SUICIDE

Of all the pretentious, esoteric, avant-garde outfits swanning around New York in the mid- to late-seventies Suicide were probably the most controversial. Despite the obviously challenging and difficult nature of the music produced by the likes of Pere Ubu, Patti Smith and Television all three had few problems being accepted by the critical elite. It is pretty obvious listening to their records where the brilliance lies, when looking through, although not ignoring, the avant-garde mesh that supports and contains them. Suicide, on the other hand, pushed the envelope too far. Despite being omnipresent on the New York scene through most of the seventies, it was always their more responsible peers that got picked up first like the Talking Heads, Television, the Ramones et al. Then, after that, the record companies desperately turned their attention to the second wave of NY punks coming through (the Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, etc.) rather than take a risk on Suicide. As singer Alan Vega points out in the sleeve-notes, it was almost a running joke amongst the record company executives about who was going to crack first and sign up the unmarketable Suicide. They were right, of course. No-one bought Suicide's albums and pretty much nobody at the time liked them. (The CD edition of this album includes a bootleg on the second disc of a gig in Belgium which culminated in disgusted punters storming the stage and stealing the microphones.) Now, though, as with a lot of these bands (which inevitably begins with the Velvet Underground) Suicide were so forward-thinking that it took a full ten to fifteen years for the world to wake up to their greatness. Their minimalist dynamics (just singer Vega and keyboardist and drum machinist Martin Rev) probably influenced a lot of the sparse electronica of the eighties (hell, perhaps even the Pet Shop Boys), and particularly the goth bands like the Cure and Sisters of Mercy. Still, though, those eighties bands obviously did not take too detailed a set of notes as most of them tried, at least, to put some stock in normal structures and vocal melodies. Vega, and Suicide as a result, were much too arty for all that. Instead, everything is broken down to a minimum. Rev's Euro-influenced keyboards are always utterly stripped-down, mostly concentrating on long, droning, simplistic riffs and static and consciously computerised drum-beats. Over the top of which, for essentially every single song, Vega alternatively mumbles or screams stream-of-consciousness snippets, again repeated ad infinitum so that most songs rarely have more than two of three lines in total. Due to this slow, repetitive and cyclical nature of practically every song it not only feels like undiscernable variations on the same song it also, on an individual basis, seems like each song is just an excerpt and, in fact, could be going on in the same way forever. I guess this allusion towards the infiniteness of computers and modern technology is pretty clever in a sense, although they fail to play with the robot imagery like Kraftwerk so famously did. In any case, it means the highlights - the nervy "Ghost Rider", "Rocket USA" and the chillingly maudlin "Che" - are hard to separate that much from the rest and one often ends up not even noticing the fact they included the same song ("Cheree") twice on the CD's tracklisting for some inexplicable reason. The only real exception on the album, and obviously the centre-piece, magnum opus and signature tune, is the harrowing ten-minute epic "Frankie Teardrop". Representing by far the true highlight of the album - and perhaps the whole point of the album - it drones on and on with a gradually escalating tension about a Vietnam vet losing his mind after the traditional story of being abandoned by the US government. No matter how many times one hears it one cannot escape the impending sense of dread and the song creeps towards its disturbing climax as Vega narrates the massacre of his own family, terrifyingly imitating their screams, before the song finally gets sucked into hell with the insane protagonist. It would be an understatement to say "Frankie Teardrop" is the key track on the album as everything before only seems to be building up to it and everything after only a chance to unwind (the album ends at its brightest with "Keep Your Dreams"). Funnily enough, presumably down to the theme of Vietnam vets having a hard time, it is supposedly one of Bruce Springsteen's favourite songs although I'd hazard it is marginally less commercial than "Born in the USA". It is certainly worth hearing it just once in your life, and the rest of the album seems to be up to a sufficiently high standard to also command commendation. The problem is, like the people around at the time, I just can't tell whether Suicide really were good or just some artistic in-joke. I guess if you like minimalist avant-garde keyboard drones supporting a spaced-out Elvis impersonator it doesn't get much better than this album. That's about as far as I'm going, though.

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Email me at: jackfeeny@yahoo.co.uk