Product Description

'Here Come The Tears' is the debut album by The Tears, and marks a reunion between Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, both former members of indie legends Suede. In keeping with their previous work, the album veers between the epic Motown-influenced rock of McAlmont & Butler and the Bowie-esque androgyny of early Suede, making for an interesting listen. Includes the single 'Refugees'.

Track Listing

1. Refugees
2. Autograph
3. Co-star
4. Imperfection
5. The Ghost Of You
6. Two Creatures
7. Lovers
8. Fallen Idol
9. Brave New Century
10. Beautiful Pain
11. The Asylum
12. Apollo 13
13. A Love As Strong As Death

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34354 in Music
• Released on: 2005-06-06
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
The title might suit the aura of faltering romanticism but Here Comes The Tears will offer nothing but a happy ending for Suede disciples who once mourned the avoidable loss of a glorious future. Unarguably one of British rock music’s most eminent severed alliances, low-rent hedonist Brett Anderson and recalcitrant guitar deity Bernard Butler permanently parted company during the fractious recording sessions for 1994’s smouldering masterpiece Dog Man Star. Like Strummer and Jones, Lennon and McCartney and Morrissey and Marr, the Anderson Butler union belongs to a distinguished line of brilliant but volatile songwriting partnerships acrimoniously (and often prematurely) ripped apart under exacting circumstances. Finally, the estranged pair conclude their dignified silence and pick up the torch where the aspirational Dog Man Star adjourned a generation ago. Naturally, Here Comes The Tears - while not attempting to atone for any might-have-beens - sounds instinctively like the best record Suede or the solo Bernard Butler never made and duly rewards by attaining some kind of ego-balancing equilibrium between the chemical rush of Anderson’s decadent glam pop expression ("Lovers", "Refugees") and Butler’s more stately and wide-angle production landscapes. Modesty being a virtue, it’s interesting to contrast the elephantine brass bombast of Dog Man Star's (admittedly wonderful) finale "Still Life" with the manner in which "A Love As Strong As Death" asserts its grandiosity with a reticent mulling of harp, piano and Hawaiian guitar. There’s simply too much genius here to mention but "Beautiful Pain" (cold turkey agony with a truly euphoric pop chorus) and the refracting, rain-soaked atmospherics of "The Asylum" simply beg acquaintance. A stunning comeback. --Kevin Maidment

About the Artists
The Tears bring Suede's Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler are back together again. No surprise to Bernard: "I always knew sooner or later it would happen," he says. And Brett too, for his part, seemed in the end to almost hasten the demise of Suede that he might meet up with Bernard and pop the question no-one else had ever dared form in their heads for the past 10 years.

"The first time we met [again] in December 2003, he said he wanted to form a band," says Bernard. "Obviously, for years, I'd always wanted make the record." And so they began, the best British song-writing duo since Morrissey and Marr, working together once again, writing with no particular aim in sight. Only later did they realise they were really onto something, something they had left undone in 1994, when Bernard walked out of Suede ahead of the release of their second album, Dog Man Star. Slowly, yet inexorably, Here Come The Tears came to be a shared labour of love; the thing that would define the year for both Brett and Bernard. "The music is really, really inspiring," says Brett. "I don't want to get dewy-eyed, but it's so exciting to work with someone who cares so much about it. For years and years after Bernard left Suede it was me running the show, but now the stakes are raised. I feel like we are duelling with each other, in some kind of friendly competition. When we were at our best it was always like that, each trying to better each other."

From the outside Here Comes The Tears certainly feels like a work high on confidence, and performed by people at the peak of their artistic powers. Brett's voice is stunning as never before – the little break in "Two Creatures", the exquisite and moving swoops of "Fallen Idol" – while Bernard simply plays guitar like no-one else alive. "When we first started Suede I wanted it to be like The Smiths, where the records were ethereal and complex and overdubbed, but the live show was just one big electric guitar ringing out," says Bernard. "I've not had either of those platforms for years." Here he plays like a man on a mission to show us everything we've been missing. A number of songs mesmerise with the chiming, complex simplicity of Bernard's guitars. At the album's centre, the dark and troubled "Brave New Century" features amazing arcs of guitar that alternately slice through the speakers and crash around your ears like so much falling masonry. Elsewhere, on the wonderfully epic "Apollo 13", the simple swaying waltz of the early verses is lifted into high orbit by the rocket trajectories of Bernard's symphonies of guitar, which call to mind nothing so much as slow-motion fireworks bursting elaborately overhead, complete with suitably awed oohs and aahs.

Largely, though, Here Come The Tears is dominated by pop songs; brazen and beautiful pop songs, delivered in perfectly formed packages. Opening track and first single, "Refugees" is swaggering, instant and majestic, and at 2'54" so brief you need to blast it again as soon as it's over.

Here Come The Tears was produced by Bernard and largely recorded at home. For him making this record as he wanted to make it was a huge part of a long healing process. "When all that [being in and leaving Suede] happens to you when you're 22/23, you don't deal with it," he says. "I hated everyone and everything, and felt confused all the time. I couldn't see through the things I wanted to do." Now, however, Bernard has been able to intricately build songs according to the grand vision in his head, and the result is an astonishing wall of sound that at times feels like Spector producing the Spiders From Mars covering "Bridge Over Troubled Water", only bigger.

The Tears are Brett Anderson (vocals), Bernard Butler (guitar), Nathan Fisher (bass), Makoto Sakamoto (drums) and Will Foster (keyboards).

Customer Reviews

The best album Suede never made
I just love this album... it's possibly the best ever Suede album and it only has Brett and Bernard from Suede... the dynamics are different, but this is old-school Suede when they were the charmers of the 90s. Amazing...

Anderon & Butler on fine form!
Suede for years have suffered at the hands of the critics, Sadly they have chosen to forget that from their debut to `coming up', there was no one could touch them in the song writing stakes. Sadly, by Brett Anderson's own impeccably high standards, the bar was set too high and inevitably the cracks started to show.

Brett has an amazing natural ability to put together an album. Instinctively knowing when to trim the flab off Dog Man Star after Bernard Butler's departure. And then poising himself perfectly, musically and lyrically, to blow away all the "What is he without Bernard?" whispers that were saturating the music press before the release of `Coming Up'. The man has an amazing ability to pick apart and analyse his own work with great success.

So after the huge magnificence of Dog Man Star and the extremely tight, solid glam hits of Coming Up. You can understand why Brett may have wanted to create something looser and a little less intense, lyrically and musically. Sadly with Suede being such an intense band this was to become their Achilles heel. It was like Pink Floyd announcing they were going to leave out the guitar solos and try something a lot easier on the ears. There is no doubt that Suede was an intense band, it was a love or hate relationship, that always demanded a response from its listener, (Very much the same situation The Smiths found themselves in).

Head Music has it's highs (she's in fashion, down, electricity) and It's terrible lows (Savoir Faire, head music, elephant man). The follow up `New Morning' continued to show a band in a creative free fall. Containing a lot of lightweight songs. Brett's new found "the glass is certainly half full" approach was more Brett's rehab album than classic Suede, with the new songs lacking a desperately needed edge. Creatively redundant, he rightly disbanded Suede and gave his old friend Bernard a call.

So here we are with `Here Come The Tears'. Things get off to a flying start with opener `Refugees' which was an unreleased/recorded Suede song. A perfect lead off single, with Bernard's lead guitar displaying all the operatic beauty that makes Dog Man Star the classic that it is. Brett is in fine voice and delivers that killer chorus with tremendous splendour which has been missing of late from Brett's compositions.

The album isn't perfect. `The Ghost of You', although beautiful in it's composition lacks any strong melody, the same goes for the quite dull `Asylum'. Its real strengths, surprisingly doesn't lie within the more direct and immediate pop songs like single potentials `Lovers' `Autograph' and the perfect `Imperfections' (the melody line of "I want you to play with my hair in the morning" just before it launches into the chorus remains one of the highlights on this album. Why oh why wasn't it a single?). Surprisingly it isn't these strong songs, but the darker album tracks that really drive this album. `Brave New Century' has Bernard on fine form, digging away at his guitar as if it's the last song he will ever play! But for me the absolute highlight of the album is one of the most stunning and beautiful composition that they have ever created, `Fallen Idol'. Lyrically musically and vocally this song delivers in spades! I might sound like gushing here, but for me this is one of their finest compositions, (just another reason why Anderson & Butler shouldn't shy away from a second Tears album) This song is as good as `New Generation'.
`Two Creatures' another classic which has a bass line opener that sticks in my head for an hour after every listen. `Apollo 13' remains more conventional Suede, lifted by Bernard's guitar. And `A love as strong as death' ends the album in a similar vein to Suede's debut.

Lack of sales and a lack of column inches in a biased music press, isn't reason enough to not owning this album. It's not Dog Man Star but it is an extremely good record! Released in a year when the likes of Coldplay, snowpatrol and Keane dominated the charts, it really should of got more praise and respect from the music press just for being a darn site more creative and exciting than any of the above. I only hope it hasn't put Anderson & Butler from working together again, as I'm sure they could still silence those critics!

A Brand New Century, or Last Chance In Reunion Saloon?
In a market flooded with releases, The Tears, are in significant danger of falling into the Just Another Album category. The long anticipated reunion of the estranged Bernard Butler and the fallen Brett Anderson turns out to be a bit of a damp squib.

Nobody would give a toss if it wasn't for the fact that this pair wrote "Suede" and "Dog Man Star" and heralded the rise of Suede in their glory years. Whilst The Tears definitely want to be seen as a new band, without this history they would sink without trace. And probably undeservedly.

Reuniting with an estranged partner after a ten year absence doesn't always yield results. Like getting back with an excellent but tempestous sex, it's a relationship that smacks of desperation. If it wasn't so bloody good.

Mostly, "Here Comes The Tears" sound like a Bernard Butler solo record with an ace singer. There's nothing new, no new ideas of any innovation, but a stream of clasic songs. Whilst there's a couple of duffers ("Autograph" and "Asylum" leap out as no marks in these high waters), most songs match the windswept vistas of hopeful lovers with Spectoresque strings and Anderson's sometimes wonderful lyrics to create something that sounds, on paper, a bit ropey, but in the flesh, knocks the pretenders to the throne back to the dark ages where they belong.

"Refugees", a Bernard solo number with a new singer, is possibly the best single song Brett has sung in almost a decade. "The Lovers" is a similarly epic bedsit drama with meaningless/meaningful couplets of such ambiguity that it could be about throwing food, or the best love song of all time. However with lines such as "your language is appalling/you play with my hair in the morning" Brett really needs to spend more time with a thesaurus. It's obvious that the youthful follies of their previous work has long been spent and matured into something altogether more potent, but less thrilling.

There's nothing wrong with these songs, and many of them are worthy of standing up to the best of their early work, but the excitement and exurberance of "Animal Nitrate" or "New Generation" is long gone, tempered by age and guile, into a new template, a new way of living that appeals more to the mind and the soul than the heart and the feet. "Here Comes The Tears" is ample evidence that they may yet become the equal of their previous band, but only time and talent can tell. A promising start to a brand new century