The Aquarian Weekly – 3/31/99
By Al Muzer

New Brunswick’s favorite stilts wearing, white powdered, occasionally naked songtress, Suran Song in Stag, has followed 1997’s immensley accessible, 10 song full band, Shiny Objects, with the patiently accessible, 10 song, bass and vox, Pure Agitator.

Paring things down to herself on vocals supported by bassist William Weis’ impressive wall of sound and delicate four string filigrees, Suran Song kicks off the new disc with an ominous rendition of Fugazi’s already dark, “Blue Print”, and wraps things up 37 minutes later with a dettached rendition of “Star” that features Weis’ sonic bass runs, dive bombing Suran Song’s ironically distant reading.

Sandwiched between the 2 excellent cover tracks are 8 curiously worded, highly emotional, strangely compelling original songs that will leave you scratching your head or find you, like me, standing there with the hair on the back of your neck bristling while a strange electricity jolts up and down your spine. With radio play lists dominated by the likes of Creed, Sugar Ray, and Marelous 3 (is it just me, or does “Freak of The Week” borrow liberally from the Byrd’s “So You Want To Be a Rock n Roll Star”?), nothing on Pure Agitator stands half a chance of mass broadcast. An uncomprimising release indeed, especially because Suran Song in Stag’s previous work was very accessible without even trying.

Curious to see the reaction on new faces to lyrics like, “Jefferson, I saw your graffiti, It said you ‘Loved’, An awesome task, No way to argue but to climb that same tower where you chose to scrawl your message” (“Cribbage In Provincetown”). Song is planning to take tunes such as “Dust Crush”, “Ubergrrl” and “Female Rape Jury” on the road for an April-May-June tour that, according to the artist, will be a “combination of garage shows, living room shows, club dates, street corners, parking lots and stores. We have a portable stage we’ve designed and built that we pull along behind our van so we can do guerrilla-type street corner and parking lot [assaults] on the Metallica tour!”

East Coast stops on Suran Song in Stag’s Pure Agit Tour include: April 1, Dover DE; Friday, April 2, Lambertville, NJ; Saturday, April 3, Pennington, NJ; Thursday, April 8, Budapest Cocktail Lounge, 234 Somerset St., New Brunswick, NJ; April 9 Torrington, CT; April 10, New London, CT; April 11, Kingston, RI; April 13, Boston; April 16, Nashua, NH; April 17, Concord, NH; April 20, Burlington, VT; and April 24, Binghamton, NY.

The rest of the tour will take the duo from Seattle on Saturday, May 1, through Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia with local stopovers Wednesday, June 2, in New Brunswick; Thursday, June 3, in Philadelphia; and wrapping up the tour, a Wednesday, June 30, performance in Lambertville, NJ.