The Sarandons

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Heartland Canadian indie rockers The Sarandons return with their second full length album, Drawing Dead, a largely live-off-the-floor record that sees the band moving from “holding on tightly, to letting go lightly,” as lead singer Dave Suchon puts it. There are still plenty of electrifying moments – from Craig Keeney’s signature guitar solos to Damian Coleman’s fiercely melodic bass lines – but the true power is grounded in the band’s ability to cope with life’s wreckage.

Though Drawing Dead prides itself on its ability to take a header into the perils of middle adulthood, The Sarandons are doubling down on their herculean stamp of defiant optimism. “Dream Machine” – the lead single – is a jeering fit of reverie that taunts with its cheerfully sung refrain, “Don’t dream at all.” This ‘why-bother’ provocation isn’t meant to be divisive, but just the opposite: an impetus for a healthier means to an end.

What can be done with despair, or the bubbling realization of what it means to be too late? The album closer, “Top of the 4th,” answers this question with what could easily be mistaken as casual cruelty. In reality, it’s a parent’s unexpected emotional response to a rundown at a ballgame, as chronicled in the song’s ethereal bridge.

“I started thinking about someone’s debut at a major event, in the context of baseball – quite possibly because of one of Hamilton Leithauser’s lines in ‘Don’t Check the Score,’” says Suchon. “And then I got to thinking about parenting, and what it takes to get to these pivotal moments, with all the sacrifice that goes into nurturing young lives, and all that could go wrong… I realize it’s not normal to be tearing up at a ballgame over a rundown,” says Suchon.

These are the kinds of heretofore sentiments found on The Sarandon’s Drawing Dead, where the lines of fiction become strongly rooted in reality. “I was thinking a lot about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and how it serves in the song as both a place and an idea,” says Suchon.

“Drawing Dead” – the focus track and the album’s namesake – is a play on going up against futility and finding peace and purpose in the inevitable. It’s about embracing defeat – or, more accurately, dealing with the cards you’re given – with a stoic resolve and an understanding of the graduations of acceptance toward total loss. That said, its glossy synths – and bright guitar leads tantamount to Wolf Parade’s Dan Boekner suggest a rebirth of sorts.

Fading feelings of denial are akin to growth, no matter how long a grace period runs its course. Acceptance, the long sought-after stage of grief – albeit from failure, divorce, or death – cannot be rushed. For Suchon, this resonates deeply, especially considering the trials his family faced early in life.

Drawing on one of his earliest memories, on “August 1982,” Suchon pays tribute to the amazing resolve and perseverance of his father, who broke his neck and was paralyzed from a freak diving accident that summer, at a backyard pool party. “My earliest memories are of Lyndhurst rehab hospital where my dad spent most of ’82 and ’83,” recalls Suchon. “I can’t imagine what he was going through, but he was always this amazing and loving father full of optimism and hope and he made those early memories really positive for me.” Later in life Suchon would learn more of his parents struggles – complete with unsolicited marital advice and phantom-like whispers of full-blooded schadenfreude.

“When I was an adult, my parents shared more with me about those years. How, at the time of the accident, a doctor told my mom she should immediately file for divorce, which… she didn’t. My dad recalled that one night, while he was still immobilized with a halo screwed firmly into his skull, someone visited and whispered something like… ‘You’re not such a big shot now, are you?’”

But through the darkness of the song is a testament to Suchon’s father, John, who passed away in 2021 at 77 years old, and his strength of character, in his ability to gracefully and beautifully live out a full life: “Oh a life in ricochet/You were with us all the way/’Till your hair was silver grey/New mornings, a new day,” Suchon sings.

The Keeney crafted “These Hearts” – one of the most tender moments on the record – puts love in the crosshairs. Suchon sings, “The way you took me back, so unexpected/I wouldn’t love you any less if you didn’t.” Rare acoustics and boiled down basics of The Sarandons give up clarified moments of strength and human likeness. The song finds Edmund Cummings delivering with laid back piano from deep in the pocket, while Keeney’s guitar offers up a haunting twang that both play off and together with Suchon’s guitar.

On “Feb_View,” Suchon imagines meeting up with benevolent ghosts, while Keeney bangs on with more solos in the spirit of The Strokes’ Nick Valensi or perhaps, Television’s Tom Verlaine, while Coleman announces the pre-chorus with a distorted bass line. The chorus showcases compelling Beach Boysian harmonies care of Cummings and Coleman.

Power lies in the late stages of nostalgia, when one is reminded of life’s loves or having to cut ties with something truly painful.

“The idea of attending something ceremonious, with shared sentiments, well into adulthood, side by side past love(s) of your life… It’s daunting,” says Suchon. “I keep thinking of meeting again, and just kind of… being there at the table. You’re agreeable and unassuming, but on the way home, you hear that one song, whether it’s ‘Simple Twist of Fate,’ or something else, that brings you back.”

“Shouldn’t I” keeps with a feverish, Springsteenian rocker, where anything is possible for fools alike, at a certain hour: “Dance on these tables like old city cops,” sings Suchon, depicting moments in time – ostensibly – where any one is above the law, while drummer Phil Skot whips up a frenzy with frenetic fills, punctuated jolts and, in the verses, minimalist grooves.

Songs like “Long Reporter” and “Henry Said” evidence humility and understanding with galloping rhythms and momentous fiction coming to fruition, with morale quickly coming to the surface in sequence with the overarching sentiment of (once more) realizing what it means to be too late. “Telling Me Nothing” opens on Skot’s drums, with Keeney stepping in to deliver some of the record’s most melodic and memorable guitar moments. The sparse verses see Coleman leading the band with deliberate restraint while Suchon exchanges with tales of broken telephone at Toronto’s historic Tollkeeper’s Park.

Though The Sarandons continue to surprise with an abundance of wonder, much like looking through a View-Master, filled with snapshots of the past, Drawing Dead is an exploration of these ephemeral fragments – pieces of a life once held together but now broken into memories. Or as the poet William Blake once put it, “Mind-forg’d manacles.” Yet, in this reckoning, there’s a certain power: the chance to process, to let go, and to find a new way forward. “I did change,” says Suchon. “When the worst thing you can imagine happens, you learn how to adapt and change for the better. That’s where the real growth begins.”

The Sarandons are five unflinching personalities, who’ve known each other for the better part of two decades. Suchon (vocals, guitar), Coleman (bass, vocals), Cummings (keys, vocals), Keeney (lead guitar) and Skot (drums) are a fully collaborative songwriting quintet, who’ve shared stages with notable Canadian acts such as City and Colour, JJ Wilde, Kiwi Jr., Kasador, Spencer Burton and more.

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