New York City’s ambient country trio SUSS returns with Birds & Beasts, their latest for the Northern Spy label, releasing June 28 on limited edition yellow and pink vinyl (700 copies), compact disc in a gatefold wallet, and digitally via Bandcamp. It’s a trim affair following up the band’s eponymous 2022 2LP compilation, but the music’s progressions are no less expansive. Often gorgeous but always substantial, the seven tracks alternate calmness and tension, grabbing the attention and then maintaining a hold.
SUSS debuted with Ghost Box in 2018, followed by High Line the next year and Promise in 2020. SUSS collected four EPs, one on each vinyl side, with three previously issued (“Night Suite,” “Heat Haze,” “Winter Was Hard”) and a fourth unreleased (“Across The Horizon”). Currently SUSS is the trio of Jonathan Gregg on pedal steel guitar, Bob Holmes on acoustic guitar, mandolin, violin, keyboards, harmonica and loops, and Pat Irwin on guitars, ebow, bass, keyboards, piano, and loops; for this album’s penultimate track “Beasts,” Irwin contributes additional pedal steel.
SUSS began as a five-piece featuring guitarist William Garrett and synth and loops specialist Gary Leib. After Ghost Box and High Line, Garrett departed and they continued as a quartet for Promise. With Leib’s passing in March of 2021, SUSS became the trio; Leib is heard on the “Night Suite” EP on SUSS and also on Birds & Beasts’ closing selection “Migration.” Knowledge of Leib’s involvement intensifies an already resonant coda.
With tracks titled “Birds,” “Flight,” “Prey,” “Beasts,” and “Migration,” Birds & Beasts can be alternately described as an environmental excursion, its ambiances formulating vistas that are distinct from Eno’s airports. This is not a tenuous assertion, as the notes for the album directly reference the music’s connection to the natural world, but it is worth remarking upon SUSS’ ability to conjure and traverse these landscapes with restraint.
While arid climes are part of the scheme, the atmospheres across Birds & Beasts are far less desert-like than one might expect, especially given the emphasis on pedal steel in the equation. Gregg certainly doesn’t shy away from the recognizably country timbres of the instrument, but he also keeps the record from turning into a rustic twang fest.
Notably, SUSS dove deep into Southwestern motifs on the “Night Suite” EP, the tracks all named for locations in New Mexico, California, and Arizona, but they did so with aplomb, this deftness extending to “Migration” here through Holmes’ harmonica and the sustained guitar patterns that strengthen a cinematic slow build. And if calm, Birds & Beasts never fades into the background; “Birds” opens the record with intensity that hits an apex later in the set’s shortest track, the foreboding “Prey.”
The influence of Eno is felt, particularly in the sequential pieces “Overstory” and “Flight,” and also later in “Beasts,” but clearly due to SUSS’ focus on glistening strings, the connection is closer to the coffee on the porch outdoorsy aura of the Eno and Robert Fripp collab Evening Star (but not No Pussyfooting, which is a very indoor record).
Ambient music has become so common that it’s inspired a range of critiques, from good natured jokes to more sober minded dismissiveness. To be sure, too much ambient stuff confuses fluidity and drift with directionlessness and mistakes the meditative with the meandering. But not SUSS, as Birds & Beasts is smartly conceived and sticks in the memory. It’s one of the stronger new releases of 2024.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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