I first encountered SUUNS in 2014 when they were one of the headliners at the now-sadly-defunct Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia. By then the Montréal-based band were already seven years into their creative lifetime. I caught them again just over a year later in Pontin’s Holiday Camp, Prestatyn at what was to be the penultimate All Tomorrow’s Parties’ festival. Here they collaborated with Jerusalem In My Heart, featuring the producer, musician and their long-time friend and fellow Montrealer, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. SUUN’s very presence at these events – whose programmes were consistently populated by some of the most weird and wonderful leftfield acts who operated well beyond the parameters of the musical mainstream – tells you much about their place on the sonic spectrum. That SUUNS have outlasted those festivals and are still going very strong also speaks volumes about their spirit and determination.
Last September SUUNS released their fifth album, The Witness to universally positive reviews. The UK dates of a wider tour of Europe which had been scheduled for last October and November in support of the album had to be postponed, though. But the band are clearly now making up for pandemic-induced lost time. SUUNS’ long-standing nucleus of guitarists Ben Shemie and Joseph Yarmush, and drummer Liam O’Neill remains firmly intact. The trio are now flanked either side on stage by Erik Hove (synths, sax, flute) and Mathieu Charbonneau (synths), both of whom played on The Witness. And it is straight to that record that the five musicians go tonight. And they go there with some pretty serious intent, playing no less than five songs from The Witness straight off the bat.
‘Third Stream’, ‘Witness Protection’, ‘C-Thru’, and ‘Clarity’ all come to us in a dense swirl of electronic-rock noise, leavened by the occasional flurry of flute and saxophone. It is dark, deep and disarmingly intense. Five songs in and ‘Go To My Head’ does exactly that, providing degrees of light to the shade that has gone before. ‘Instrument’ and ‘Translate’ from their 2016 album Hold/Still provide a momentary reacquaintance with SUUN’s formidable past before they sign off with the last track from The Witness, the epic tour-de-force that is ‘The Trilogy’. It is not something for the faint of heart.
Strong support on the UK and Irish legs of the current tour comes courtesy of Kee Avil, a project led by Montréal producer and guitarist Vicky Mettler, reinforcing the view that Quebec’s most populous city is clearly a hotbed of prodigious artistic talent. “It’s true, I know I’ve been playing this game for too long”, Kee Avil murmurs the opening line from her first song of the evening, ‘Okra Ooze’. Taken, as it is, from her debut album Crease which was only released a couple of months back, coupled to the fact that this is not only Kee Avil’s first visit to the UK but also her very first show on these shores, the words belie the relative nascence of her career.
Kee Avil presents with a quietly understated confidence. All alone at the microphone save for her electric guitar and supporting cast of electronics she breathes fresh life into the studio incarnations of the songs from Crease. Her voice, often no more than a phantom whisper, hovers eerily over the splintered, experimental waves of sound that she creates. This is no more telling than on ‘Drying’. “Say you’re a ghost, but I’ve seen them before. Never been alive, not like this before”, Kee Avil intones as the song teeters along its chosen path, somehow held upright by its own ambition and personal resolve. She ditches the guitar for the concluding ‘Devil’s Sweet Tooth’ and with her disquieting half-spoken delivery sounding as if it is coming from the great beyond she announces the arrival of a genuine musical explorer.
Photos: Simon Godley
Some more photos of SUUNS
And some more photos of Kee Avil
