The interplay between wide, dark space and the staccato optimism of sustained life creates the most carefully structured record of SUSS's career. Birds & Animals not necessarily surprising, but it crystallizes the essence of this band, particularly as they find their footing after the shocking loss of Leib. These seven tracks are full of delicate balances, so impeccably crafted that malleable details take on a life of their own—the way the guitar melody barely floats to the surface of “Restless,” for example, or how the pedal steel Greg's seems to change direction mid-song, as if the band has just turned the tide of a river.
The only track featuring their late partner is “Migration,” which has been in the SUSS songbook for years before ending up on this album's closer. The most maximal composition in an understated set, “Migration”—like “Restless” and “Flight”—is stitched together with delicate guitar stitches, transparent parts that keep this patchwork whole. Meanwhile, Holmes's harmonica offers a sense of longing, a train whistle heard in a one-horse town.
Such associations carry with them all the postmodern weight and irony that has accumulated since America developed a vocabulary to describe the culture (one horse!) of its vast heartland. So do the song's buried vocal loops, most of which are inaudible, though we can hear a male voice saying, “Finally, they thought they had the answers,” a self-serious exclamation that fades out like a distant radio signal. . We open the album with an image of the migratory patterns of the titular birds and beasts, and end by thinking about humanity as it enlarges so rapidly that the world-expanding achievements of the past become graphic, pieces of modern archeology familiar enough to have become part of our species' natural habitat .
SUSS revels in the slippery distinctions between man-made and instrumental, the way a synthesizer can sound indistinguishable from an acoustic instrument in the right hands. Their latest, however, puts human achievement into context – our entire civilization, this brooding, glacial music seems to tell us, is merely a blip at the end of a slow evolution. Or, in other words: Birds & Animals offers the revelation of a road trip through the country, when cities fall apart and the land becomes grander, when people start to feel as small as they really are.
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