Suuns - The Breaks
On their sixth long player The Breaks – their second for Joyful Noise Recordings – SUUNS find themselves lost in limbo. For some artists, being caught in flux may result in songs that are either naive, out of touch or both, simply as a consequence of being cut off from human civilization. But for SUUNS, a band who have grown more than comfortable in the oblique and the intermediate, it actually had the opposite effect. The Breaks marks the Montreal experimental rock outfit’s most emotionally resonant and tonally rich collection of music to date.
The trio of Ben Shemie, Joseph Yarmush and Liam O’Neill leans more zealously than ever into their pop instincts. Yet remarkably enough, with that same dauntless abandon, SUUNS have mined a more extreme sonic palette this time around, one that stretches far beyond their core fundamentals as a band. “Before we had a kind of rule that we wouldn't have any instruments on the record that we weren't actually playing,” drummer/percussionist O'Neill says. “The recordings we made were always more of a document. There were no overdubs. And now…we don't care about that! Now we do whatever just sounds good.”
