The Formative Years – Suicide
There are few albums that capture the merging borders of the roots of alternative disco, punk, new wave and what was to become post-punk like Suicide’s debut effort.
Creating an idiosyncratic melange comprised in equal parts of distortion, cacophonous beats and demented howling, Suicide sounded sincerely exciting and dangerous.
The paranoid driven debut album Suicide (1977) and the follow-up Alan Vega Martin Rev (1980) are both slabs of vinyl full of attitude that epitomize the minimalist primal force and tense sonic equivalent of the animalist threatening chaos the duo unleashed in a live environment.
Each and every song seems to be informed by a sinister, menacing dark undercurrent, including the cheesy, poppy ditties. Suicide was a band that felt truly liberated, informed by a hostility that was fuelled by the fact that they had nothing to lose.
While Suicide never attempted to blend in with anything or anybody, they became immensely influential, left their vile imprint on what was to become electronic music and unintentionally not only created a template for synthesizer and vocalist duos but influenced everyone from Joy Division via Radiohead to Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen.
Suicide’s live recordings document the confrontational antics of the duo to the extent that at times it proves to be difficult to decipher the music from the pandemonium it soundtracked.
Proto punk at its best.
