The Works of Drew Tewksbury, a Multimedia Journalist

Album Reviews

Suicide – Live 1977 – 1978

By Drew Tewksbury ⋅ July 2, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

suicide - live 1977 -1978 Suicide is not for everyone, and the six-disc box set of the brutal, self-indulgent, no-wave duo of Alan Vega and Martin Rev opens up the back catalog of America’s punked-up answer to Kraftwerk. With Rev rolling out repetitive keyboard lines, backed by a rudimentary drum machine, and Vega vacillating between manic screams and mutant-Elvis warbles, Suicide’s sonic experiments are mantras of madness. On the one hand, the box set is essentially a field recording of Suicide in the wild, containing extremely raw snapshots of the carnage that the proto-electro punks perpetrated across Europe on their first tour in 1977, supporting Elvis Costello and The Clash. “This is a love song from the people of New York City to you,” Vega tells the audience in Paris, only a couple days after the band’s June 16, 1978, performance in Brussels that instigated a riot. “He’s out of his mind,” an audience member yells, after Vega steals his microphone back from the unruly crowd, who boo to the beat of the Rev’s endlessly looping drum machine. Suicide’s revolution did not come without a fight. Yet, the box set is a labor of love for the band that presaged ’80s techno and the post-punk milieu (as well as the recent electroclash era), and a fragment of a musical moment that forwarded a cultural movement.