The mission of a Suuns song, is to get you somewhere else. It's not a vacation or a method of escapism, the way you might think is meant by such a statement but this mission really is to get the you that you associate as yourself - the one that you introduce and get introduced as at parties - as far away from your person as possible. It doesn't matter where that you goes, as long as it takes the hint and just disappears, rubs itself out so that there's no longer any identity conflicts to be mussed with. The Montreal band's latest mind-fuck of an album is a discourse is taking a known thing or a known person and riddling it with holes and leaks all over the place. It takes some of those dark fears and makes them bright accusations, lit up fears that are then worn for a while and legitimately tamed. We tend to feel - when we're panting and spinning in the vortex of a Suuns song - as if we're blistering from getting cooked alive. We feel as if we're being tested and as if we really are not here any longer. This - all of this that we're hearing and experiencing - is the day of the locusts and that silent shrieking sound, like an emergency siren spraying off red warnings all throughout our head is our temporary warm and fuzzy feeling and we do like it. We like being someone other that who we are. It suits us when other things don't. Suuns lead singer Ben Shemie sings on the song "Gaze" a revealing two lines, two lines that it's hard not to take to heart, when he sings, "Don't you be yourself/You are someone else." "PVC" is another song of personal confusion, as Shemie sings, in a way that makes us think of warm bath (sometimes with electric eels, though they've promised never to lash out), of a confusion involving breaking something open, the combing of some hair and the breaking of a mirror. It's all a lovely blur and it does even come close to explaining anything, but who wants clarity, anyway? Then it's just too easy to be happy or sad or stale and sedated. There's no explaining anything and that's the way it should be. There's no explaining anybody and that's the way we should always want it.
Suuns, which includes Liam O'Neill, Max Henry and Joseph Yarmush in addition to Shemie, tell of a "gold in the mountain and all the people living in the sea, you know that I love you, oh don't you know that you love me" on "Organ Blues" and it's not the first time we feel as if our hands are being led by some those who might believe in the twee conditions and sentiments of the human condition, but who might not believe that we're alone out here in this solar system or that we really have any pull in he operation. It's a weird, rocky cosmos that we're dragged into and it offers us endless fine points to hear and think about as we go through "Zeroes QC." "Pie IX" is something like a disturbing coochie-coochie nuzzling being done to a psychotic baby, but still a baby that needs to get some rest and is obviously long past its bedtime and thoroughly exhausted. It makes you think that you're dealing with some real, drug-takin', unfit parents, but boy do they make some interesting noises and they should most definitely get some credit for that, if for nothing else. They compel us to be someone other than ourselves and we can see that they blissfully take their own advice.