Suss

Counting Sunsets is a quietly expansive continuation of SUSS's slow-motion Americana, tracing new lines through the terrain they've been mapping across their run of albums for Northern Spy. As with earlier releases, the band leans into wide-open desert horizons, kosmische drift, and noir-ish pedal-steel laments, but this time an end-of-day stillness permeates. Counting Sunsets feels episodic and reflective: a sequence of small, neon-glowing moments that pass like light changing at dusk. Each piece arrives with the calm assurance of a band attuned to negative space, tone, decay, atmosphere, and melody. A quiet preoccupation with memory and the slow erosion of time. Light fades and the air carries sound.

Suss: Ghost Box (Expanded) [CD]

Suss: Promise [CD]

Suss: High Line [CD]

Pioneering ambient country trio, SUSS “perform with an effortless sense of synchronicity,” according to Stereogum. This quality is as vividly on display as ever throughout their latest full-length, Birds & Beasts. SUSS’s recordings have garnered much praise for effecting a sense of long drives through desert landscapes, a context famously ripe for such synchronicities: slow motion pedal steel guitar, dobro and near-subconscious synthesizer rumbles and sweeps seem to operate via the same logic as that which dictates the interactions of a road-weary mind and a cloud of migrating birds. While SUSS’s previous records have dealt in these kinds of scenes, Birds & Beasts –– though instrumentally more spare –– deepens the sense of meaning and meaning projected.

New York-based ambient country quintet SUSS follows up its acclaimed album Ghost Box (Expanded) on Northern Spy Records with a new 7 inch EP, "Chisholm Trail" b/w "Aurora". Together, these tracks find the musical horizon line where the end of the trail on the A-side meets the cosmic expanse of the B-side. Drawing on psychedelic influences as diverse as the Flying Burrito Bros and Boards of Canada, SUSS uses a combination of big-note guitars, pedal steel, harmonica and synthesized sound to take a chill, heroic trip into the great American West and beyond.