Review: suspects - It's just you and me now (EP)

Label: suspects audio documents

Is this citation? Is it plagiarism? Or just lazy c&p? I'll tell you this: I really don't care, cause sometimes you got to pay credit where credit is due and that's the reason why I'll post the text that is on SUSPECTS' Bandcamp-site in its entirety. This text is just awesome and it tells the background story of this project in a coherent yet haunting and moody kind of way.

Just to add some cents of my own: This is not really a band, it's pretty much a one-off-project, originating in 2012, laid to rest in 2013 and picked up again by coincidence in 2020. Sound-wise the most interesting thing to report is that Sean Hoen, of THOUGHTS OF IONESCO-fame, delivers the vocals. And even when this EP isn't as chaotic or destructive as the stuff from Detroit's 90s-force, it has a similar feel to it. A dark, bleak and somehow mysterious feeling that flourishes over the course of these four songs. It sounds pretty unique and you can't quite put it into any category, as it borrows something from (Post-)Punk, something from Alt-Rock (ALICE IN CHAINS anyone?), something from good ol' Bulldozer-Hardcore and something from 90s-Noise-Rock while maintaining abstract throughout. The cassette, that was deliverd with a 44-site-long photo-collage, was limited to 50 copies and is already sold out. 

So now, without further ado, here's the text piece from Bandcamp:

The rich smell of street trash and humidity hung in the air one late night in the summer of 2012. The word “SUSPECTS” frantically scrawled upon the cover of a scrapbook; a street treasure. Illustrative music photographer and musician (Nathaniel Shannon and the Vanishing Twin) picked it up. Nothing out of the ordinary for something grabbed off the street at 3 a.m., when the ghouls of NYC are out lurking for fresh blood.

As Shannon flipped through the scrapbook, he was shocked at the detail of the collages, not to mention the scribbled words, almost as prose, written in the seemingly dark corners of the concrete jungle of New York City.

Pieced together as a collection of reflection of time spent suffocating within the steel walls of a city that is celebrated for breaking the souls of its inhabitants. Shannon showed the scrapbook to drummer Nicholas Maglione, and bass player Brent Wallace. The trio began to write a score based around the prose in the scrapbook, and recorded a 4-song EP, to which it was thought, Wallace had the only copy.

Wallace went missing the spring of 2013 while on a camping trip to Allagash, Maine. Shannon and Maglione quickly abandoned the project, mourning the loss of their bandmate. Somewhere amidst the chaos of the spring of 2020, Shannon found the “SUSPECTS” scrapbook and cassette tape of the original recordings while cleaning out an old storage unit. Shannon and Maglione enlisted the help of best-selling author / Thoughts of Ionesco madman Sean H. to add vocals to the songs and finished what they had started.

Partially this act was in tribute to Brent Wallace, but also with the hopes that the author of the “SUSPECTS” scrapbook would hear the record and approve their musical interpretations of the words found therein. It was decided to copy the scrapbook, and present it as a 44-page zine with digital audio archive access, or the “Evidence” pack consisting of the zine, with cassette tape of the recordings, and digital audio archive access. The audio components were mixed and mastered by Jeremy Page (that handsome devil, czarface, kendra morris) during 2020’s quiet summer.

Rating: 8 out of 10 7.5 out of 10 (November '21)

suspects on Bandcamp
Nathaniel Shannon on Instagram