If you want to approximate the hypothetical essence of time travel, consider a drive through the southwestern United States. Mountains and mesas rise from the landscape in improbable ways, making it impossible for a new arrival to tell if a geographic feature is 25 or 250 miles away. A four-hour drive down an empty desert highway can feel as sublime and effortless as a Sunday stroll in a city park. The New York quintet SUSS capture these surreal sensations with uncanny precision on Ghost Box, their debut album. The band self-released a seven-song edition of Ghost Box in February; it took surprising hold through Spotify, with the whistle-laced “Late Night Call” alone accruing several million streams. Now, under the aegis of experimental syndicate Northern Spy, they have updated it with four unreleased tracks. What was once a neatly rendered portrait is now an immersive panorama.
During the 1980s, SUSS founder Bob Holmes and Gary Lieb, who manipulates electronic loops here, were part of Rubber Rodeo, a country-fried New Wave ensemble that suggests a midpoint between the B-52’s and Southern Culture on the Skids. In SUSS, their spirit is less hurried, favoring slow-motion ascension over neon ricochets. Jonathan Gregg’s elastic pedal steel playing summons shifting desert views, while the gently twangy guitars of Pat Irwin and William Garrett shape a distinct country sensibility, so these pieces feel more like songs than mere soundscapes.
The environments SUSS create aren’t populated by swaggering buckaroos or shoot-’em-up showdowns; they instead survey the vast swaths of nothing and no one that cover so much of the Western landscape. “Wichita” begins with wobbly circles of guitar and pedal steel, spiraling around two alternating bass notes. It’s immediately hypnotizing, almost narcotic, suggesting it could go on forever. Other tracks are hazy or ambling. “Steam,” an addition for this edition, expands and contracts repeatedly over its seven-and-a-half-minute stretch; soft puffs of static offset pools of pedal steel and guitar, which reverberate through layers of distortion. The drift recalls the vague anxiety of watching a serious storm approach, especially as thundering low-end builds during the back half.
Like the desert, which secretly teems with life, SUSS’s ambiance reveals greater nuance and depth upon inspection. A throbbing industrial rhythm and distorted snippets from cowboy movies nearly make “Gunfighter” unnerving, creating menacing tension by wrapping inky rhythms in pedal steel. “Canyonlands (Return to Wichita)” is wistful and marked by the slightest trace of uplift, while the echoes of someone whistling through the hum of “Late Night Call” lends the song a sense of aimless searching. The whistle is gentle and loose, used to fend off boredom or announce one’s presence to figures unseen, not a sounded alarm.
The animating principle of Ghost Box is less one of manifest destiny than deliberate moseying, underscored by the expansive guitar ripples of “Rain” and the moderate rhythmic patter of closer “After the Storm.” Ambient music aims to build an environment, be it one that can be relegated to the background or create an all-encompassing wonderland. With Ghost Box, SUSS favors the latter interpretation through a vivid landscape where mellifluous tones foster the mystery and magic of a fabled landscape.
