Suss :: Counting Sunsets
Cover Art: Darryl Norsen
Photo: Jim Bennett
Since forming in 2016 as a quintet with members Bob Holmes, Pat Irwin, Jonathan Gregg, William Garrett, and Gary Leib, who unfortunately passed in the spring of 2021, the New York-based ambient and experimental ensemble SUSS eventually slimmed down to a trio and has become something of a feverish force in the cosmically cinematic and instrumental landscape of independent music for the last decade. With their latest effort, “Counting Sunsets”, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine that all this spiritual sound and transcendental texture could be coming from just three people holding down the lucid line between tender thought and reality. Like an ancient star occupying the silvery skies of the never-ending night, the group pushes its instrumental intimacy out into the open for all souls to stir in their carefully curated clothes just before the liberating levee breaks, casting its creative content back into the cold crevices of the Atlantic Ocean. Making this the band’s fifth studio album, and fourth with the Brooklyn-based label Northern Spy, originally started by former staff of the legendary ESP-Disk’ imprint, SUSS have returned to the softened surface after the sonic success of 2024’s “Birds & Beasts”, and like a dormant dimension waiting to be further explored by eager ears, and sharp senses, their latest album pulls those sensitive strings, allowing zero slack in the line. The band’s bond and its magical members have been responsible for some serious sounds in the undeniably unique unknown.
Photo: Orestes Gonzales
As cinematic and cosmic as the past, present, and future of each member’s intelligent input into the melodic machine that is SUSS, the trio tends to bend those familiar fabrics as early Floyd or Tangerine Dream did in their poetically prolific prime. While casting seducing spells into the vacationing void, the Melting Pot players patiently wait for the radical ripples to ricochet off the walls of the realms they’ve worked so hard to break through, and capture any of these elemental essences that pass through at any cost. Throughout the album’s sophisticated structure and blistering backbone, a spiritual signature within the band’s lyric-less language begins to appear in the windows of the world like a melodic moisture before it fades into the galaxy’s glass. Featuring tracks such as “Sunset VI”, “Sunset II”, and “Sunset IX", “Counting Sunsets” takes listeners, both new and old, on a journey through the burning brilliance of ten sunsets, whose sentimental subconscious radiates rays of revolutionary rarity in today’s climate of cosmic culture. Where the sky meets the ground in a series of captivating coincidences, SUSS is there to collect the contents and express the geological gestures in the most epic way possible.
