Band Of Susans: Hope Against Hope

Every new year presents an opportunity to jump off the new music release hamster wheel to focus a little more on the past.

Our Lost Albums series is a sporadic one, mainly due to the point noted above, and it’s these quieter parts of the year that allow for reflection. It’s a time where you can ferret through the back catalogue in search of gems that are lost, unpolished or even unloved by some. In the case of the latter, Band Of Susans’ Hope Against Hope is an album that springs to mind.

Spearheaded by vocalist/guitarist Robert Poss and bassist/ vocalist Susan Stenger, the New York-based collective underwent various incarnations throughout their active years. On their debut LP, Hope Against Hope, Poss and Stenger were joined by Susan Tallman (guitar), Susan Lyall (guitar, backing vocals), Ron Spitzer (drums) and Alva Rogers (backing vocals), and together, this unit smashed barrelling noise-rock into post-punk that, at times, felt like two freight trains colliding.

The title Hope Against Hope bears a spooky resemblance to today’s world and looking back to when it was released, the optics weren’t all that different. Aggressive capitalism was rife. So too global conflict, with the tail end of the Cold War and the impending years that would see George H.W. Bush’s administration green light more of it in the shape of the Gulf War. Has anything changed? Not really.

While Band Of Susans may not have been your dyed-in-the-wool political act per se, I still can’t help but feel that Hope Against Hope had connotations suggesting otherwise. (Look no further than one of the album’s shining beacons in Throne of Blood.)

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Mixing the melodic essence of Sisters Of Mercy with the aggressive textures of their label mates, Head Of David, who released Dustbowl the same year, this early manifestation of Band Of Susans seemed, well… misunderstood. Following the Blessing and Curse EP a year earlier, 1988’s Hope Against Hope was bagged by all and sundry. At the first time of listening to the opening salvo, Not Even Close, as Robert Poss’ guitar rang in the ears, it begged a simple question: was this the same record everybody else was listening to?

Like having a fire lit beneath you, Hope Against Hope was an album that enigmatically ticked all the boxes, and trying to correlate this untypical indulgence with everything that has been written about it remains an unresolved anomaly.

It’s this claustrophobic admiration that makes Hope Against Hope a difficult record to unpick, simply because it’s so hard not to lose your mind when listening to it. The blistering power sonics, so hypnotic that any sense of equilibrium is gone. So potent that any words about it are rendered empty, and that needle hasn’t moved since Hope Against Hope came into my life decades ago.  

Amid guitars that roar, chime and echo all the way to the corners of the mind, perhaps Poss puts it best on Not Even Close (“Listen to your heart / There’s just enough margin for error”). Stenger’s backing vocals add beautiful inflections to this leather-clad odyssey, too. In the case of Stenger, perhaps Hope Against Hope was in the taste makers’ ire due to her lack of involvement as lead vocalist – a facet where she would become far more prominent on Love Agenda and what many consider the band’s glory years with The Word and the Flesh and Veil.

Still, it’s hard to go past something like Learning to Sin. Dispensed with immediate gusto, it’s a song that Sisters Of Mercy should have written. Rhythmic, motoric post-punk for high altitudes as euphoria drips into the world of goth. Stenger’s searching bass line operates under a combat of guitars between Poss, Tallman and Lyall that reach frightening, visceral levels.

So too Throne of Blood. The kind of senses Ian Astbury and The Cult sparked frequently throughout the same decade, here Band Of Susans take it even further, mixing street level New York swagger with political nuance that packs the strongest punch of all. (“Gestapo diplomacy / A face without features / A squirming charlatan on a white horse / Squints into the public eye and lies”).

Again, politics could be construed on All the Wrong Reasons, as Poss sings, “We stare into the future each day / And live for the hope that some help is on the way”. Metallic, guardrail-scraping noise at quartet speed, Band Of Susans present something that slowly unravels like a veil of smoke in some backstreet dive bar.

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Not just on Hope Against Hope, but instrumentals were an important facet of Band Of Susans’ story. Inspired by the likes of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham (they covered the latter’s Guitar Trio on The Word and the Flesh), Elliott Abrams in Hell and No God are like belching fires of white-hot hell, and here Band Of Susans leave a trail of annihilation in their wake.

And there’s no let up on I the Jury, which sees Band Of Susans at their gnarled, stiff upper lip best. A subtle not to the Ramones, the band takes the shards of punk, flailing them around the pantheon of noise-rock, as the thunderclaps of sound rattle the foundations. Then there’s You Were an Optimist and Ready to Bend. Moving seamlessly inside their evolving sound world, here they take the ideas of Learning to Sin, streamlining them with songs fit for high speeds and open roads.

It’s those same roads that lead to Hope Against Hope’s eponymous track. Having featured on the Blessing and Curse EP (along with You Were an Optimist), the closing stanza is like diesel coursing through the main lines. With guitar tracks piled up to the sky, in all its blood, sweat, tears, leather and brawn, it screams with the civic vitality of a biker’s club house.

Rightly or wrongly, many will claim that better days were ahead for Band Of Susans. With their dynamic use of guitars, the band stamped their own mark on guitar orchestration, amalgamating the ideas of Branca with the borderless, power chord glory of AC/DC. Listen closely, and you’ll find subtle nods to the Australian behemoth on Love Agenda, which followed Hope Against Hope a year later in 1989. Those ideas were executed perfectly, however with Hope Against Hope, this incarnation of Band Of Susans delivered something that permeated with an untethered aura. It was this raw, grainy exploration of sound that formed the band’s foundations, and without it, Band Of Susans may not have become the band they did.