Zeroes QC


Band: Suuns
Album: Zeroes QC
Best song: “Armed for Peace” is great. “PVC” is fun. “Arena” is shockingly good.
Worst song: “Pie IX” isn’t much.

Any year-end list of best 2010 albums is going to be a little incomplete. Forgetting the notion of “when does a decade start and end,” last year’s giant list provided me a ton of fun in looking back at the years between 2000 and 2010.

So, a best-of for 2010 isn’t going to be as exciting; Only one year v. 10 years is almost instantly less exciting. Which isn’t to say that a lot of good records came out this year. They did. Beach House released a great, well-regarded album. Lil Wayne released two albums, though neither was much. Broken Social Scene put out a brilliantly interesting record and Band of Horses did their usual boring but fun rock music thing.

And, of course, Kanye West released one of the best albums I’ve ever heard (the hope is that I’ll write it up sometime soon, but don’t count on it. I can’t really add to what others have already said.).

The single record by a new artist that gave me the most recent pleasure is most certainly Zeroes QC by Suuns. Coming out of Quebec, the band’s sound dances around Death from Above 1979-ish rave tracks, Kraftwerk-esque electronics, guitar rock riffing and filtered shoegaze vocals. “Gaze” starts with a stumbling drumbeat, while album ender “Organ Blues” is funereal in its tone. “Arena” dances around a retro keyboard line, while “Fear” has tinges of Fleet Foxes-esque vocals and a dancing melody.

It’s when the band branches to the outer reaches of genres and melody, the results are delightful. The grand example of this is “PVC,” a song that’s repetitive and choppy as a Bloc Party record, with the construction of a Daft Punk song. Almost post-rock-ish in its repetition, the vocals are a jsut another part of the mix, that combs in and out of the song, eventually building to a crescendo.

“Armed for Peace” is similarly defying. Starting with a slow Moog-ish sound over an almost-808 beat, the band eventually comes in with startling aplomb. Like Tortoise’s “Seneca,” the song starts on one note and takes a direct right turn, all while keeping an air of the original note.

Canadian rock — as I’ve written before — often gets lost in the shadow of the nation’s recent revival of a scene. But, Suuns is nothing like Montrealers Arcade Fire. Zeroes QC is amazing, liquid and dense.

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  • About Me

    I'm Ross Jordan Gianfortune. I am not a writer, but I sometimes write here about music and my life. I live in Washington, DC.

    I used to review each of Rolling Stone Magazine's top 500 albums of all time. Now I'm writing about albums I own.

    My work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Gazette, The Atlantic, Sno-Cone and a bunch of defunct zines.

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