No Filler Music Podcast - Noisy, free-flowing, and truly liberated: The music of Band Of Susans

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

Emerging from New York's noise rock scene, Band Of Susans broke away from the rock clichés that were all but set in stone by the late eighties, liberating the genre alongside their grungy shoegaze counterparts. On this week's episode, we dive into a handful of non-singles from "The Word And The Flesh" and "Veil". Tracklist: Mood Swing Trouble Follows Silver Lining Not In This Life Trouble Spot Big Hush - Soft Eyes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's better-h-el-com slash no-filler. Thanks again to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode. episode. Welcome to No Filler, the music podcast dedicated to sharing the often overlooked hidden gyms that fill the space between the singles on our favorite records. My name is Quentin. With me as always is my brother Travis. And today we are diving into Band of Susans. And we're going to cover a couple albums of theirs from the mid-90s. Here's what I'm, my main concern, here is, whether or not every single member of the band was named Susan. And it does look like, I'm looking at your roster, the roster on the screen here.

There were several seasons. There were several seasons, dude. Here you have coming out of this band, but there are also a lot of non-susans. So I wonder if the original lineup were the three Susans that I'm seeing on this list. Well, we're going to have to learn that together right now, dude, because I'm pulling this one out of my butt, man. Dude, sometimes those are the best episodes, you know, we're just swinging from the hip. Yeah, dude. First off, Trave, that was, so the intro was one of the singles on their album from 93, Vail.

The song was called Mood Swing. What did you think, Trap? Yeah, I love the guitar. I love that kind of back and forth. That intro. Yeah, it reminded me of Unwound, which we did an episode on them a few weeks back. These guys, I think, kind of fall into the swerve driver pocket. That particular guitar style, too, reminds me a lot of the kind of stuff that Brett Daniel was doing some of the early Spoon style.

Oh, yeah. And, you know, maybe there was a little bit of influence there. But, I mean, it's definitely the same, that kind of angular style of guitar where it's just, you know, very stabby. You know, I always think of the word stab kind of. comes to mind. It's a great way to describe it, dude. Yeah. Because it's just like in and out, right?

Yeah. And these guys were part of that New York Norse Rock scene alongside Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca, which we covered some of his music. And, oh, I can't remember his name, dude. The lead singer from Sonic Youth was a part of Glenn Branca's orchestra. So they drew influence. from him, they were coming up

alongside all those New Yorker Norse rockers. Let's see, dude. Let's find out together how many Susans were in the original group. If it's not every single one of them, I'm going to be really disappointed. Because that's false advertising.

Yeah, I know. It's kind of a bummer. Because when I, yeah, when I stumbled upon this band, that's my first album. Oh, cool, dude. It's a great name, dude. I love the name. You know what? Even if not even one of them was named Susan, it's a great name. Yeah. So it was formed by avant-garde floutist, Susan Stinger, and guitarist Robert Poss. What a dope name, Susan Stinger. A floutist. A floutist, dude. That's even better.

They took their name from the trio of Susan's then in the lineup. So there were three seasons. Okay, so those three seasons were in the original lineup, all right. Susan Stinger on bass, Ron Spitzer on from Susan Lyle on guitar and Susan Tolman on guitar as well. Do you think that they tried to get Robert to change his name? Like, dude, come on, just change your name. We need another sous. You don't even have to be sued. You could be sous.

And that's the thing. It's not you have to change your actual name. Just go by Susan, you know? Yeah. Your stage name. I would have done it if I was him. So here's a funny thing, dude. I think we've mentioned this twice now.

As people like to say this with any, American shoegaze band, they like to say things like, due to their layered guitar sound, they were sometimes seen as the American counterparts to UK shoegazing bands like My Bloody Valentine. Dude, we've now heard that. Literally every shoe gaze band that we've talked about over the past couple months have had that same sentence used to describe them. They're just like My Bloody Valentine. They're America's answer to My Bloody Valentine. I guess it's because Shugays originated in the UK.

So it's almost like how Kleenex, everybody knows what that means, even if you're not actually, you know. Right. It's like, go get me some Kleenexes over there. Like the brand might not be Kleenex, but we all know what Kleenex is or Xerox, right? Can you make a Xerox of this? Like Xerox is a brand, right? So it's almost like, My Abilentine is just a synonym for that particular sound of shoegaze, you know? Right.

But they don't have that sound, man. That's what's funny too, right? is a lot of times we walk away saying, well, they really don't sound like I believe Valentine at all. So it says here, and this is all coming from Wiki, so apologies if they weren't fact-checked. Yeah, by the way, if we ever say that we're pulling an episode out of our... Our derriars. Out of our derriers.

That means it's going to be a Wikipedia episode. Yep. Just so you know. So it says, musically, the band organized their three guitarists into providing an overwhelming wall of feedback and guitar noise. layered atop more conventional song structures. Sounds like shoegaze to me. Due to their atmospheric, wait,

due to their focus on atmospheric textures, the band is often considered a peripheral member of the shoe gaze movement, though they had a more abrasive sound closer to that of their New York contemporaries than most of the primarily British bands of the shoe gaze genre. All right, I think on that note,

let's play our first song, dude, because I, yeah, what I liked about, so the first album I listened to, was Vail from 93 So that intro track was Are we gonna skip around here? We're gonna play from two albums Okay

I like that it's more Guitar like riff Centered you know It's structurally more like Just rock rock and roll You know But maybe sonically it's a little bit more Shugazey

And that's dude And that's when we start digging ourselves In a hole man You know it happens a lot When we start trying to be like Well why is it shoegaze It doesn't matter Yeah I mean

wall of sound, right? Wall of sound. Whatever that means. And probably, I mean, what are their vocals like? Is it kind of your typical breathy, soft vocals? Or do they... A little bit. A little bit. You know what?

You'll find that together. That's right. So the first album we're going to jump into is their third studio album from 91. It's called The Word and the Flesh. The song is called Susan. Yeah, all the song names should have just been called Susan. How amazing. How amazing with that of it.

All right. So we're going to play track three on the record. This song is called Trouble Follows. Big sucker for the drums, man. He's great. I really like it when it's, I mean, I could do that drum beat. You know what I mean? And I suck.

I can't drum. But, but, yeah, I mean that as a compliment. Like, I like it when it is a really, really simple drum beat, especially when it's paired with something like that kind of noisy noise rock, right? Because it's an interesting kind of dichotomy or whatever. Yeah, I love his drum beats. And then vocally, it's kind of, yeah, kind of more like swerved diver, like you were saying earlier. Swirv driver.

Swirv driver, yeah, sorry. Marita, sorry about that. I don't know you're the super fan. But yeah. Thurston Moore. That's his name. Sonic Youth, I just remembered. I think the vocals are more the kind of stuff that you heard coming out of New York.

Like, it has a little bit of a punk flare on it, you know, I think, just a little bit in his vocal delivery. But yeah, let's, let me read these quotes from different publications on this album here. The Boston Phoenix called it a refreshingly joyful noise. The NME said the album was nothing less than pure. demonic euphoria. I like that. I like how the band referred to the album as their tribute to the E-cord. Yeah, yeah, that was funny.

It's kind of funny. So I'm guessing that was the E-cord that we heard right there. Beats me, dude. Alternative Press called it a feast for the guitar rock aficionado. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. Like, what is it about the shoegay sound that people are always drawn to? And that's the guitars, man. as Catherine Will

lead singer, I don't remember his name, but as he said, about some of their music, the guitars were the stars, you know? Yeah. And I think that's what makes Shugay's,

there's just something about that just kind of draws you in. It's always that guitar sound, man. Well, what's great about it is like, you're not, we're not hearing, like,

super sophisticated guitar picking and, like, guitar solos and stuff. But that's not the kind of guitar that you get out of a Shugay song. It is really, really just very simple repetitive you know just something hypnotic

it's a wall of noise and it's not yeah it's not like sophisticated in in how you might think like a guitar heavy band might sound like you know like I don't know who like isn't like a Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton

you know or something like that yeah but but yeah it's it is it's the guitar aficionado is gonna love this stuff to me it's just like a rush of It's like a warmth, you know, it's like a pink. Yeah. It's almost like, yeah, dude.

It's almost like it's the My Bloody Valentine loveless cover, you know. It's almost something like that. Right. But now, there's just something that sort of like, if you like this kind of music, it just, it just feels like something just sort of like rushes kind of over you. You know what I mean? Yeah. Too.

There's some publication. Okay, this is a UK weekly podcast. pop rock newspaper. They said about the album, this will blow your fucking hand off. This is utterly dazzling. Daszling? That's a nice,

that's a good way to do. Dazzling? Let's play another song, dude. All right. So we're going to jump all the way down to track 10. This song is called Silver Lining. A good choice, Q, because that's a very different sounding song than the last one.

And it had a lot of, like, punk sensibilities to it. Oh, yeah, dude. A pop punk song from the 2000s. I was going to remind me of like a Blink 182 song. Yeah, a little bit, dude. I didn't even think about that. Or to be, to put it in the same, to put it a little bit closer to a better comparison or maybe be like the lead singer of hum kind of had that voice too.

But yeah, the drumbeat for sure was like a punk rock kind of drumbeat, you know. Great song. And, you know, their sound changes a little bit between this one and the next one, which is Bail, which is the next one we're going to cover. I think this is the New York noise rock side of their sound, you know? Like, it's not a UK shoe gaze band. But here's, let's just take this song for an example of, like, if we look at this song, I don't think anybody would say, oh, yeah, that sounds like my bloody Valentine.

No. That's why I'm always confused, because it's like apples and oranges, you know? I mean, really. It'd be nice to have someone that we could chat about this with that was paying attention to rock around that time. It's almost like we know this guy that writes for the Rolling Stone who is on our podcast and was writing about music in the New York scene. He probably freaking interviewed these guys at some point. We should reach out to him again, dude, and just have him join us to talk shoegaze, period. New York shoegays.

Go. Just see what he says. Yeah. So if you don't know who we're talking about, David Brown, senior writer at Rolling Stone. own. He wrote a biography on Sonic Youth called Good By 20th Century. And we got a chance to chat with him about Sonic Youth. And yeah, we should reach out to him. That would be a good way to just put a bow on it. Yeah. All right. Let's jump to the next record of theirs, which is the first one that I heard called Vail came out two years later in 93. We're just going to play some music, dude.

I got nothing else to talk about. Dude, we don't need to talk about anything else. You're right. Music can speak for itself. That's right, dude. And we are going to play. Track two on Vail. This song is called Not in This Life.

Yeah, now we're talking, dude. Because, you know, we got one of the Susans is singing. And as we've talked about plenty of times on this show, I think female vocal, or at least a higher register vocal, is the perfect match for the Shugay sound. I prefer that vocal sound over Robert, I guess the other singer. Sorry, Robert. But I think that's just because I think it complements the Shugay's guitar, Norse Rock kind of thing, I think, much better than his voice did. But that's just my preference, you know.

But anyway, I really like that song. And again, the drummer was great. Drummer's awesome. Yeah, and you can hear them evolving with their sound, you know. I really like what Melody Maker says about this album here. It says, Vail soars like Lindberg's Plain, a sublime, breathtaking fluency. This is rock at its most liberated and free-flowing. I like that, dude.

Thinking about it coming out in 93 and, you know, how much rock was changing around that time. Yeah, dude. Like, this is, it's cool that rock was starting to head in this kind of direction as far as, like, sonically, you know, like the wall of sound and the, just the change up, man, that Shugay's and Grunge had on the landscape will forever blow my mind. What did I say the most free that rock is? It is the most liberated and free-flowing. It's an interesting way to think about the sound of rock in the 90s because it broke free from the freaking arena rock. Exactly. It broke free from like the standard rock structure that you had thought about coming out of the 70s and to some extent the 80s.

Yeah, exactly. That's why we like 90s rock so much, you know. Seems like the rules were just thrown out the window. That's why there were so many different interesting rock genre. genres, rock subgenres, you know? So many, dude. It's just mind-boggling when you think about it. All right, I'm going to jump ahead a little bit.

We're going to play the last half of Not in This Life. Here we go. Yeah, I like how they're kind of harmonizing there. At least they're both singing. Yeah, and like their voices just faded away at the end there. Yeah, I like that. This is rock liberated and free-flowing. All right, well, let's send it on home here, Q.

Let's send it home, dude. One more track here to play. From Vale, this song is called Troubled Spot. The instrumental outro there, that continues on and kind of builds on itself like that for like another minute. The majority of the song is just a really cool little jam. I'd like to take back all the mean things I said about Robert's voice on the last track. I love his voice. I think what's interesting about this band is that I talked about how her voice is a,

really great pairing with the guitar sound that they have. But then the two songs, Silver Lining and Trouble Spot with his vocals, they work really well for those types of songs. It's like two different styles of songs that we're hearing, you know, kind of more the punk forward type stuff, like punk leaning type stuff. Although that last track was just, I guess, more of like an alt-rock track almost. Yeah, it was a little more moody. But I love, I love, again, the drums and the and the guitar. I mean, they really work well together in this band. Is it another, is the drummer one of the Susan's?

No, it's Ron Spitzer. Okay. So Ron is, is an amazing drummer because he's, you know, what do we say about the spoon drummer a lot? Like, it's not about necessarily being a really complex and, like, technical and stuff like that. It's about like knowing what beat to play, when to hit the symbol and stuff like that. Yeah, that is what impresses me. the most in a drummer.

Keeping it simple, it's nothing fancy, but it's just effective. Yeah. Even if it's stripped down and bare. I think Ron is, yeah, he's, he knows exactly what drumbeat will work with all of, you know, every single track we've heard today. I think his drums are perfect, you know, great companion to whatever the, the track needs, you know. Totally.

But yeah, great, great stuff, man. Yeah, dive into these records. man. I've really only listened to these two. I just like how different each track sounded, too. You know, I think that's one of the things I actually don't like too much about Loveless by my Bloody Valentine's. I feel like it is all, it all sounds the same, you know, from track to track. Unless you're paying attention. Unless you're paying attention, yeah. If that's the headspace that you need to be in, like it's the perfect album to put on.

Right. But you don't get much variety. You just get that album. The album, I feel like, is just the singular thing. You know what I mean? Yeah, I know what you mean, dude. And you kind of, you're going to have to sit down and just kind of enjoy it, you know. And it really was the blueprint for so many shoegaze bands. But yeah, I know exactly what you mean. And Vail, dude, you got to give this album a listen all day through. Yeah, I will. That one, out of the two that I listened to, I really liked Vail. And that guitar intro that the album starts with and that we play it in the beginning of the show, Killer. Really cool. Yeah. And so they split up in 96.

I don't see, at least on Wikipedia, reasons why they split up. But, yeah, they weren't together for very long. I mean, I guess 10 years is long. But. Yeah, it's pretty good run. Yeah, pretty good run. But they came and went. I'm sure they're active in other groups these days.

But yeah, that is our quick and dirty on band of Susan's. Short and sweet for this week. but yeah man great stuff shout out again to the members of the Shugay subreddit this was on a

post someone was just looking for for bands that kind of went unnoticed under the radar Shugays groups and someone recommended the word in the flesh

by Band of Susan's on there so I dove right into it and loved it so really if you're into this kind of music Shugays the Shugay subreddit is not just hey here's a band that sounds like my bloody Valentine so much of it is really great grungy alt rock it's the stuff we've been covering

for the last couple months you can find so many great bands not just from the 90s either they have there's a lot of people that share contemporary groups in this vein so yeah I've definitely found a lot of modern new gays if you want to use the term to describe some new or shoe gaze bands. Yeah, from that subreddit. So definitely worth a follow or subscribe.

I don't remember. What do you do on Reddit? Do you follow or do you subscribe? I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember. But yeah, just, you know, do whatever it is you're supposed to do on Reddit to follow them. But, yeah, that's a good little collection of songs there, man. And what I like about it is, yeah, just how different they all sounded, you know.

Definitely. I think that's what we've learned about Shugays here in our journey this year. And in 90s, Alt Rock in general, just how varied it is, you know, especially under the Shugays umbrella. Yeah. And I feel like with the bands we've covered so far, like, I'm able now to understand how it all fits under that umbrella, you know? Like, I didn't think of Grunge. and shoegays being two sides of the same coin before I dove into this stuff.

But now, like, I'm starting to hear the similarities. Yeah, definitely. But, you know, Grunge also swings way over to the, to like the heavier, almost leaning toward metal side in ways that shoegaze doesn't, unless we're talking about Doomgays, of course. Yeah, there is like a sweet spot where there's a lot of, of like crossover between the two, you know.

Oh, yeah, definitely. And yeah, and I think we talked about this too at some point, but like, Shuegage was almost overshadowed by Grunge when the grunge, like, when Grunge went into the mainstream, right? But then Grunge went away, but Shugay and Dreampop have always been there. We're going to kind of dive into Grunge's comeback, right?

We're going to cover Narrahead. Yeah, we're going to talk about, we're not going to really stay in that vein, But we have a batch of episodes lined up where we are finally going to step out of the 90s. I know we've talked about how we could stay in this decade all year. And we could. But we're going to take a break from the decade, but not necessarily the sound. So we're still going to be talking about the same type of rock or subgenre of rock or whatever you want to call it.

But we're going to talk about and finally do a proper episode on Narrowhead. Because they've been a staple on this podcast for like the last two years. years because they show up in what you heards they show up in you know best of the year yeah it's it's it's it needs to be done i want to get into these guys and kind of find out their story yeah so we're going to talk about their first full-length album called satisfaction and um yeah they they are like i've said before like they they really take the best of 90s all rock and just sort of created their own reimagining of it i guess, but like you will pick up on a lot of different 90s alt rock sounds when you listen to this record. But they just do it, they do it like flawlessly, like perfect. Right. It's not a

carbon copy of any of those sense. It's really like recycled in a really unique way. Yeah. It's like a, it's like a pickup, right? Like a continuation of. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, we're going to do that maybe next week. And then we've got a few more shoegays, um, bands from like the 2000 and on that we're going to talk about. One that I'm really excited to talk about called Pink Shiny Ultra Blast. This record is amazing that we're going to talk about. And then, you know, a few other bands we have in mind. And we'll see how long we can take that, you know, because I think we've, like we've said

before, man, there's a never-ending amount of amazing shoegaze bands out there to talk about. I'm not bored with it yet. I know you're not. Hopefully the listeners aren't, but I don't think they are, man. We've been getting some love. We've had quite a few listeners reach out to us and actually, this is a good segue, dude, because we're going to fade out with us with a song from an artist that Adam suggested for us. He actually reached out to us a few months back, just letting us know that he really liked the hum episode. And he just messaged us today with a recommendation for a group called Big Hush, who, I don't know. Anything.

about this band. Haven't listened to any of this stuff yet. And we're just going to outro us out with the first track on their album from 2017 Spirits slash Holes, which is an album he recommended for us. Well, let me tell you something, Adam. If you love hum, you got to tune in to next week's episode. So yeah, thank you, Adam, for the recommendation. If you have a band that you think we should cover or talk about, a band that you like in this vein, reach out to us. on Instagram at No Filler Podcast. You can email us at Nofiller Podcast at gmail.com. We love hearing from you.

We love listening to the bands that you all suggest for us. Keep them coming. And, yeah, as always, you can find us on the Pantheon Podcast Network. That is the network for music lovers. That's at Pantheon Podcasts on Instagram. Pantheon Podcasts.com is the website. And as always, we want to give a shout out to AKG for supporting the show and the network.

And yeah, that's going to do it for us this week. Again, we're going to fade out with a group recommended to us from Adam called Big Hush. We're just going to play the first track on their 2017 album, Spirit slash Holes. This song's called Soft Eyes, and that's going to do it for us. Thank you, as always, for listening. My name's Quentin. My name is Travis. You know, take care.