Hold/Still

Taken in one extended listening session, Hold/Still proves titularly prophetic because you’re left exhausted from all the foregoing textural and tempo twists. One could liken the experience to ingesting a handful of lysergic tablets and then deciding to run a marathon that lasts all night. Once you’re done, you’re done for good. Hold still, kids.

Suuns have never been slouches in the mutant kosmische department, but the John Congleton-produced Hold/Still blasts them into a new dimension. [Jun 2016, p.81]

This is Suuns’ third album but their essence hasn’t changed, just honed.

Their most restrained and finely detailed record to date.

The four remain honest with their work, and the work rises to the challenge as a result.

Suuns have created a record which doesn’t thumb its nose at the existential problems of listener in enjoying and listening to music, but identifies with it and mounts the only truly acceptable response: make music reflective of, and worthy of, our scattered brains.

It’s a consistent, methodical unsteadiness that hangs a song on a single blurred synth tone, a suspension bridge between two guitars acres apart in the mix, and then shoots it with bolts of electricity.

Even if some of the songs have spare, measured rhythms that seem easy enough to follow, the group will make the guitar notes spiral into strange directions or build the feedback up to hair-raising levels.

Despite its few too many twisted Thom Yorkisms, Hold/Still is a convincing attempt at making the impossibly bleak impossibly toe-tapping.

Genres fall by the wayside as krautrock melts into a studied and dense electronica, and pulls either towards the tenseness of post-punk or the hazy surrealism of shoegaze.

Hold/Still conjures up the existential mood of floating in deep space. Lonely--but also out of this world.

There are areas, in the likes of Instrument, where the creeping grooves are compelling and the tension is perfectly poised, but time and time again these moments are lost amongst reverb bursts and toxic swells that go past the point of creating a metronomic cue to something sinister, and instead appear vexatious in their oppression.

Hold/Still tries so hard to be ominous that it almost always forgets to be interesting. [No. 130, p.61]