.whatever they do best, they do best together. It’s worth remembering just how much David McAlmont and Bernard Butler really hated each other seven years ago.
Leaving iconic Britpop band Suede before Britpop was the full-grown flag-waving beast we look back on now, Butler got together with David McAlmont and.
Having had a massive collaborative hit with the awesome ‘Yes’ and a more modest one with the more modest ‘You Do’, the former Thieves singer and the former guitarist parted company with the air around them blue with criss-crossing abuse. However, with the bad memories fading – and the fact that both Dave and Bernie’s solo careers have long since hit the iceberg in the frozen North Atlantic of the post-britpop years – they’re back. The usual amiable PR bullshit pack does its best to paper over the cracks, as Butler suddenly picks up the phone to call McAlmont after six years of awkward silence to invite him back into the studio. But whether his motivation in doing so was really because “he’d been writing songs David McAlmont had to sing” is a moot point. And in fairness, for the best bits of ‘Bring It Back’, it’s not even important.
For just as ‘Yes’ provided the hitherto unfeasible link between white bread indie and Shirley Bassey torch singing – and brazenly flicked the rods at Butler’s former collaborator Brett Anderson in the process – the best bits of part two are, in their unlikely way, very fine indeed. As the self-mythologising opening track ‘Theme From’ demonstrates, with the passing of time, McAlmont sounds several times more like seventies falsetto soul genius Curtis Mayfield than Mayfield ever did himself. The best, however, is yet to come. ‘Falling’ – the thinly veiled ‘Yes’ mark II – has much of the fist waving bravado of its predecessor and if anything, surefire next single ‘Different Strokes’ is even better than that – an intricately woven little southern soul pastiche with a chorus the size of East Anglia.
Time is evidently a great healer. Perhaps more cynically, it was a lack of solo success which saw guitarist and vocalist bury their respective hatchets after having spectacularly fallen out following the release of their debut album in 1996. Surprisingly, the break appears to have done them more good than harm, with the appropriately titled encumbered with few, if any, of the bitterness which drove them apart seven years ago, getting right back on the horse with an album which operates in the best soul traditions. Although occasionally stumbling into the kind of soul-lite favored by the likes of the, the pair are at their best when turning up their noses to the bland arrangements which clog many of their contemporaries and diving deep into high maintenance strings and grinding wah-wah guitar - 's voice is one of the few which can do justice to such over-the-top string arrangements, while wields his hooks like a weapon. Although often ridiculous, with something of the do-or-die feel to the long-player as a whole, the album is at its best when tipping its hat to the heady sounds of and their ilk - the opening 'Theme' and subsequent 'Falling' possibly the closest thing modern music has come to capturing the spirit of Motown's golden age.