The Black Country trio SUE recommend listening to their new single ‘Get Over It’ during long evening drives. This is perhaps not the soundest advice (pardon the pun). Aside from disturbing all manner of wildlife, ‘Get Over It’ will render your driving abilities practically useless as you headbang and shut your eyes to savour the sounds in your ears.
The first twelve seconds of distorted strumming on the track are heavenly nostalgia for any Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden fans, then in a split second it switches to a Deftones-like crackling blizzard of shoegaze rage. A much quieter bit comes after that, in which we hear the sinister observation ‘There’s a thief looking under my skin’, the words delivered in a dazed drawl that sounds like William from Swiss-British coldwavers Lebanon Hanover. ‘I’ve been losing grip…I’ll get over it!’ isn’t an entirely convincing claim when the vocals seem to have been sung while falling off the side of a large building. Perhaps they were. ‘Get Over It’ is indeed a thrilling freefall, yet for all the nihilistic chaos, it’s as controlled, polished, and well-structured as any Butch Vig-produced classic.
SUE have referred to themselves as ‘gothic grunge’ and ‘alt noise rock’. As dreaming up genres is usually the job of journalists who wish they could play guitar, let me get involved with the name-calling: I’m going to file SUE under the category ‘bands I cherished like close friends when I was 19 and which articulate my despair while also making me feel at least 15% more alive’.
By: Neil Laurenson