By some Suede-y contrast, here’s the second single for Coming Up, their comeback album from… what, maybe two or three years after Dog Man Star, the last album with Bernard Butler…? Something like that. The band had two new members, Neil Codling and Richard Oakes – I can’t believe I can remember their names without looking it up, and feel suitably embarrassed about that, to be honest – who’d both taken on some co-writing duties with singer Brett Anderson, and Suede was re-created as a much shinier, less threatening thing to take advantage of the Britpop scene that was already beginning to decline. “Beautiful Ones” was the second single off the album and… it’s catchy, and it’s fine, but it lacks the presence of something like “Killing of A Flash Boy.” It’s lightweight and disposable, and for all the sly comedy of the lyrics (“Shaking their meat/To the beat/Yeah” and “Shaking their bits/To the hits/Oh” indeed), it’s also slightly embarrassing; a parody of the sexual ambiguity and danger of the band they used to be.
More depressingly, this was by far the best of the singles from the album, and probably the best of the tracks at all, with the possible exception of the (equally arch, equally camp) “She”: