Lydia Lunch/Suicide - Frankie Teardrop 10"

Lydia Lunch - 'Frankie Teardrop' (originally from Suicide - Suicide, 1977)

This is the latest release from the Alan Vega 70th Birthday Limited Edition EP Series from BLAST First (petite), the same as Bruce Springsteen's cover of 'Dream Baby Dream'. This one won't get as much attention - that post of mine got picked up by Metafilter - but if anything, Lydia Lunch, from the original No-Wave movement, is best placed to cover probably Suicide's most aggressive song:

"Lydia Lunch.

Known to Rev & Vega as the Baby Faced Killer who they so kindly chaperoned through that lost downtown night world crucible from where both their futuristic, and highly influential, black arts would be born.

Artistic Kings & Queens from the dumpster side of town.

Lydia gets all wet and dirty with thought of what young Frankie Teardrop might do to her, over a twisted frug of an electronic beat-nicked soundscape by David Knight."

(BLAST First (petite))

Yeah, if you read that last part - best not play this in the streets, it might frighten the horses. The transition from male to female vocals - equally unconventional in the original and cover, and both intensely carnal in their own ways - and the more 21st-century sounding backing track makes this a really good updated version of 'Frankie Teardrop'.

Of course, the original is pretty untouchable, and the 'Frankie Teardrop, the Detective vs. The Space Alien' extended demo version which, while interesting enough in itself, is still a far cry echoey scream from the finished version we all know and fear:

"...We're all Frankies

We're all lying in hell"

The cover image is very real: an X-ray from a knife attack in November 2007 on a 16-year old boy in London (he survived) that was released to the press by the Metropolitan Police.

(Click to expand images)

10" vinyl available from Cargo Records

Downloads from BLAST First (petite) on eMusic - this particular release isn't up yet, but the Springsteen and Horrors ('Shadazz') are

Bruce Springsteen vs. Suicide - 'Dream Baby Dream', Nebraska

Bruce Springsteen, 'Dream Baby Dream' - cover recorded live for the Devils and Dust solo tour, 2005, and originally released on Suicide - Suicide, 1980. (Long file, give it time to load)

Download

'State Trooper' from Nebraska, 1982.

'Atlantic City' from Nebraska, 1982.

Dream Baby Dream 10" (art/cover photograph - 'Stars' by Edward Mapplethorpe, 1994)

Nebraska LP (second-hand copy)

"To mark Alan Vega's 70th birthday, blastfirstpetite is releasing monthly limited-edition 10-inch vinyl singles featuring versions of Suicide songs, starting this month with Bruce Springsteen's cover of Dream Baby Dream.

Snapshot:

Who are Suicide? Marty Rev and Alan Vega - two Jewish New Yorkers who founded the band after they met in 1971. Vega says: "We were angry and we wanted to wake people up"

Why are they important? Suicide had a punk-style attitude and violent edge to their music that predated the Sex Pistols by several years. They invented synthesiser rock, paving the way for a host of '80s and '90s electro-pop bands

Who have they influenced? Who haven't they influenced? Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, New Order and Pet Shop Boys would all probably never have existed without Suicide. U2, REM, Radiohead, and even Bruce Springsteen claim them as heroes...

(from - pretty much by accident - the Jewish Chronicle, 'Suicide: How the godfathers of punk kept the faith')

...Vega and Rev became part of a music New York scene densely populated with Jews, including Joey Ramone, Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group, Richard Hell of the Voidoids and Chris Stein of Blondie.

Vega even jokingly refers to the legendary club CBGBs where all those bands played as "one big synagogue".

As Suicide, they created a new type of electronic rock'n'roll - they were a sci-fi Sex Pistols, before the Pistols existed. The problem was, nobody knew what to make of them or their guitar-, bass- and drums-free line-up. In fact, they were the prototype synth-duo, the model for Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys and the rest, with the lugubrious keyboardist and gregarious frontman.

"If we were the future, it was a future that nobody wanted," admits Rev, who was once approached by the Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren to form a boy-girl outfit with Blondie's Debbie Harry. "There was nothing about us that was familiar."

Rev is as thoughtful as Suicide's music is visceral. Of his religious beliefs, he says: "I can't box myself into any one system of practice or ritualised thought for very long." And he describes his upbringing as "social-oriented humanitarianism; non-religious bordering on agnostic". He admits, however, that he later "studied in-depth ancient Hebrew texts for a period of years". He concedes that he "can't imagine living in a world where there isn't a God". He admires non-believers but cannot quite make that leap himself. "Having that sense of awe about the universe, which is what religion is to me, I wonder how they can live without that.

It's like love - it doesn't have to be real or true, but to live without it... It's hard enough to get up in the morning as it is."

Vega is similarly ambivalent. He alludes to the "miraculous" nature of his career with Suicide and fateful meeting with Rev, begging the question - does he believe in a higher power?

"I distrust the name ‘God' but, yes, I do believe in a higher power," he says. He adds that he shares the rationalist stance of Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher and "pantheist theologian". "God is in all of us," he says, before deciding: "There is an immense power. There has to be."

After years of changing his back-story, telling journalists his mother was Catholic, he is finally proud of his roots. "I made that up to fuel the myth, because really, my whole life has been a myth," he says. Now he can come clean. "It's funny, but I'll never stop feeling Jewish, no matter how much I might talk my way out of it.

I'm very proud to be part of this tradition. It's brought me a lot of knowledge."

He is equally proud of Suicide and flattered by the attention of musician-fans - artists as varied as Springsteen, Nick Cave, Primal Scream and Julian Cope are lined up to release cover versions of Suicide classics every month from now until 2010. Even Amy Winehouse is apparently keen to get involved.

"There's an authenticity to our music," he considers. "It's country 'n' eastern music, or New York City blues. I sometimes call it ‘Two Jews' Blues'. Really, though, we're our own category. People always say: ‘You're too much in the future.' And I tell them: ‘No, you're too much in the past.'"

Blast first (petite) is a contemporary reincarnation of Blast First, a sublabel of Mute Records founded in 1985 by Paul Smith, which released records by Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Suicide and many more. The name came from the journal of the Vorticist modern art movement, BLAST, published in 1914 for the first of only two issues, but containing the Vorticist manifesto and considered a seminal text of 20th century Modernism.

The Alan Vega 70th Birthday Limited Edition EP series continues monthly (and when the vinyl sells out, as the Springsteen is supposed to have, you can buy it as a download from the site) with a whole bunch of different artists - amongst others, The Horrors and 'Shadazz' this month, Lydia Lunch and 'Frankie Teardrop' in November, Sunn0)))/Pansonic with 'Che' in January, and Grinderman, Liars, Spiritualised and Gavin Friday listed for later, as yet unnamed, versions.

If you haven't heard Suicide before, you're seriously missing out. It's been years since I first heard the first self-titled album from 1977, and then the more recent works including 2002's American Supreme (previous post on it here) and 1992's Why Be Blue?, but I have found few bands as novel and engaging. Suicide's second album, also self-titled, was released a couple of years after the first and doesn't sound a huge lot different, though it's not just a straight repetition either. To be honest, I don't like it as much as either the first self-titled or American Supreme, although it has got some undeniably great pop songs on it, of which 'Dream Baby Dream' is just one.

Their minimalism and their subversion of pop music (though of course from Suicide's point of view, it was the rest of the world which - before and after punk - had degraded the core of rock and roll, not them) don't quite seem like the qualities which would have attracted Bruce Springsteen, the Boss of extragavant, if soulful, rock and roll. However, they did, and he is obviously still their one of their biggest, and best-known, fans. (In a similar fashion, Joan Jett is a big fan of Lungfish.)

This fandom is most evident on Springsteen's most stripped-back, bleakest album, Nebraska. It was recorded as, and eventually released from, a four-track cassete tape demo - after finding that studio recordings with the E Street Band failed to capture the eerie, sharply emotional sound of the solo demo recordings. While the whole album is consequently minimalist by comparison with his other works (excepting other stripped-down, folk-influenced albums The Ghost of Tom Joad and the recent Devils and Dust), 'State Trooper' forms a particular homage to the sound of Suicide. In a previous post on this album, I wrote:

"I've seen this album described, half-jokingly, as Springsteen's emo record. If you've already heard Nebraska, you might just understand that. Emo like Moss Icon at their most repetitively circular and dirge-like, perhaps, or Hoover in one of their most pyschologically anguished ultra-quiet build-ups. You see, Bruce brings a lot of emotion to this recording, but it's not the heart-on-sleeve, slightly melancholy exuberance of Born to Run - instead, it's a catalogue of despair and brooding, incipient sadness. Often, it's not merely 'eerily' quiet, it's goddamn scarily quiet.

In fact, there's a different niche of punk that this album takes its influence: Suicide. Springsteen was a big fan of the no-wave New York minimalist duo, and presumably still is, since they continue to put out some very good stuff. Not only is their a sonic affinity audible in the sparse, empty arrangement of the album as whole, but one song - 'State Trooper' - is a direct homage to classic '77 Suicide. The same hollowed-out motorycle-engine beats, the same tense vocal delivery. It's not quite as terrifying as 'Frankie Teardrop', but it comes close."

Nebraska - as with most if not all Springsteen - is pure Americana, but all the more so for its unorthodox references to Suicide's style of proto-, electro- and post-punk. It's real American-dream-gone-wrong stuff, expressed in the language and features of that great society, and - just as Suicide took the idea of rock and roll and reconstructed it in a new, simultaneously harsh and beautiful mechanical medium - Nebraska survives on the pre-existence of its folk paradigm, mediated through Springsteen's then rapidly establishing style.

'Atlantic City', although also one of my favourites from the album, is included above mostly just to show what is probably only the most rocking song on the album, and so as an indication of just how suppressed the energy is on Nebraska. In fact, the opening title track is heartbreaking, evoking the coldness and gloom of the cover picture and the 'badlands' of the northern Midwest (though typically the other two tracks here revert to talking about Jersey). 'Johnny 99' and 'Highway Patrolman', like 'State Trooper', swing between inert sadness and active tension; and while 'Open All Night' injects some anomalous energy with the use of an electric rather than acoustic guitar, 'Used Cars', 'My Fathers House' and 'Mansion on the Hill' are all steeped in melancholy. Album closer 'Reason to Believe' at least offers somewhat of a rousing conclusion:

"at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe"

Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska (1982)

21st Century Bites: A Mix

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Side 1 - 20:24

1. Suicide - Televised Executions

2. Si Schroeder - Brailowsky (schroedersound remix)

3. Battles - Tonto (The Field Remix)

Side 2 - 33:28

4. Q and not U - Soft Pyramids

5. Dan Deacon - Wham City

6. Grails - Silk Rd

7. For Carnation - Moonbeams

21st Century Bites - download as two tracks ('21-1' and '21-2')

21st Century Bites - download as individual tracks (1-7)

_________________________________

The idea for this mix came when I was watching the film Manhunter on TV a couple of nights ago, and decided I wanted to listen to some cool 80's electro pop. Since Betamax Format haven't released their EP yet, the nearest (and yes, not very near at all) thing I had to hand was Suicide's 2002 album, American Supreme. Anyway, the first track on that, 'Televised Executions', was the genesis for this selection.

The '21st Century' part of the title is a reference to the fact that all these songs were released within the last 8 years, with the earliest being the For Carnation in the year 2000. Musically, it's not that these artists necessarily sound very 'modern', and indeed most of them have their origins - whether in earlier releases or in previous groups - in the preceding century.

Broadly speaking, these songs are 'electro' in at least some sense, moving towards more usual post-rock with Grails and the For Carnation, although there is plenty that is unusual about those two groups. The first side is the more wholly electronic, with far more rock tropes in the sound of Q and not U and Grails. If you're looking for punk, it's either nowhere or everywhere...

(A technical note: I decided to try out the long mp3 form of josephlovesit's playlists, one for each side. If I do say so myself, I think it works very well for the first side in particular. Nothing special was done to them, except for a few sections of silence between tracks being removed - no cross-fading or whatever it is you are supposed to be actually able to do with Audacity. Both formats are available for download above, although if you want both be aware that the zip files - and the folder in them - have the same name.)

21-1/Side 1

Suicide's 'Televised Executions' from American Supreme starts off with a combination of thin drum sounds which are characteristic of Suicide's sound right from 1977, and hip-hop scratching, which isn't. On top of this, of course, are funky, repetitive keyboard lines and echoey rockabilly vocals. This is a fantastic album, not just for the consistency with which it matches the original 'no-wave' Suicide, but also for the incorporation of contemporary sounds (well, contemporary in 2002 - you should hear their 90s album; a little dated!). What I said when I first posted this album still stands, that "if you've ever wanted to hear hip-hop played like weird 70s electronica, this is very possibly the album for you".

An instantaneous moment of relief, Si Schroeder's 'Brailowsky' remix comes from a limited-edition 2006 7" of the same name, with paper sleeves and original artwork. Si Schroeder, as his Myspace describes him, is "a six foot hairy male who makes 'music'" from Dublin in Ireland. Previously, he was one half of a Sonic Youth/MBV style noise band, so you can kind of guess where he's coming from in this piece and in his idiosyncratic electronica in general. 'Brailwosky' is instrumental, although other songs have lyrics, all with a soothing, ethereal and above all beautiful quality of sound. Road Records say of his full-length album, Coping Mechanisms, "hats off to mr schroeder for doing something very new and inventive with laid back electronica. really really superb stuff". 'Brailowsky' (a reference to a 20th century French pianist) has a lot of the same, characteristic melodies and flourishes follow on into that album; a really nice song. I met him in person once - I should say that he is a relative of a friend - and he seems like a very nice guy too.

While 'Brailowsky' is very calming, I think it has a hard enough edge to stand up to the intensity of the preceding song and the following, The Field remix of Battles' Tonto, from the Tonto+ EP. The original song is an epic, expansive and at times very intricate and complex post-rock/math-rock tune, full of space and balance - something which is largely abandoned here, as the heavy remix track layers on the intense rhythms and compresses everything into a tight, claustrophobic sequence of sounds. I don't know anything at all about The Field, except that I think their style can be classified as house - correct me if I'm wrong - yet I find this remix immensely and almostly unreservedly enjoyable. The vinyl EP of Tonto+ has the album version followed by this remix on the first side, and the Four Tet remix of 'Tonto' and a further remix of 'Leyendecker' on the other, neither of which do much for me. This version of 'Tonto' - and if you aren't familiar with the original, you owe it to yourself to watch the video here - is a revelatory take on the Battles' track, and a celebratory one of musical intensity in a way - techno, house, whatever - that is quintessentially electronic.

21-2/Side 2

To bring this mix back to the - perhaps unlikely – haven of Dischord Records, this is the opening track of Q and Not U’s second album, Different Damage. ‘Soft Pyramids’ begins with a wonderful spoken word intro, “S-O-F/T-P-Y/R-A-M/I-D-S E-V-A/P-O-R/A-T-E in day-light”, and for that alone it is a quintessentially math-rock song. As Mr. Mammoth wrote last year, “q and not u disbanded two years ago, ending a seven year stint as one of the more relevant and original bands to emerge from the d.c. punk scene. though the term "dance-punk" is one often associated with q and not u, the unfortunate connotations and limitations of that genre really can't explain the band's rather unique post-hardcore sound”. Like him, the frantic, punky No Kill Beep Beep is my favourite of their albums, but given time, what Different Damage reveals in its subtlety and complexity more than matches up with the quality of their debut. With the band’s re-emergence as a three-piece (following the departure of the bassist on No Kill Beep Beep) on their sophomore release, “a more sober (yet just as disparaging) look at America”,

“the first two songs on Different Damage set the album's tone, the divide between ferocity and reflection - "soft pyramids" is almost tender, a sweet singalong that is starkly contrasted with its neighbor, the vitriolic "so many calls," a jittery and sneering attack on our broken healthcare system”

('yo, you remember how good q and not u was?')

Lyrically, I think this song has something to do with the ephemeral and supeficial nature of modern human civilization - appropriate for the mixtape then! Most of Q and not U's lyrics are very interesting, but also very distracting to try and understand. This tends to be the case with these kind of math-rock bands, like the current Foals. Really, it's just a reflection of complexity and cerebral twistiness in both words and music.

Trickling gently into the next song, it is Dan Deacon's utter masterpiece, 'Wham City', "the all-encompassing complexity of the perfect creation" which stretches to nigh on twelve minutes of sonically and emotionally confounding composition. It's awesome live; you can see the lyric sheet here. Listening to this song again reminds me that a Dan Deacon live show is not just a musical experience, but a deeply emotional one as well. It's strange, perhaps, because Deacon's songs are based so much on electronic - albeit analog - instrumentation, something I don't immediately associate so much with feeling. However, the flourishes, the slow build-ups and sustained, drawn-out electronic riffs on 'Wham City' are sincerely affecting. The incessant drumbeats only add an underlay of urgency to the epic soundscapes of emotion and ambition present on what is possibly this man's, or anybody else's like him, finest work.

Next up is the rhythmic, exotic post-rock of Grails on 'Silk Rd'. Grails are possibly the least electro of the artists here, although 'samples' and 'tapes' are listed on their liner notes. Instead, they bring a range of Eastern influences to pretty usual, guitar-based post-rock. GY!BE seems like both a good and a bad comparison: Grails play similarly rich, textured compositions in which, usually, a good deal more happens; but that which does happen is still quite subtle. The title 'Silk Rd' conveys the sense of a journey, and this is an especially propulsive song. Yes, it gets quite heavy at times, but in a melodic, cymbal-bashing kind of way and not with epic, labyrinthine guitar riffs. The sound, as josephlovesit notes, is largely clear and undistorted, allowing the strange and exotic sounds to come through. Blend77 says on Zen and the Art of Face Punching, where I was first hipped to this album, that

"The eastern feel of these songs is not hokey in anyway and goes a long way to legitimizing these songs as mantras for spiritual understanding. Yeah, that sounded like some new-age shit. Grails are not new-age. They are incredible-age."

Finally, turn your speakers up for one of the quietest albums I know of, released by musicians known for their work in ultra-quiet rock and in a genre known for the exact same thing. This is the For Carnation, Brian McMahan from Slint's later group, and the closing song from their self-titled album, 'Moonbeams'. This is the first time I have posted this up on the blog, although the first three tracks of the album were up previously (and will not be upped again - just go to the Touch and Go website for samples). As far as I know, this was released in 2000, so it just slips into the 21st century mix. The electronics are restrained to a shimmering, elliptical ambience which trails the sparse guitar and drums, and occasional, carefully placed keyboard bloops. The sensation of darkness pervades this record, as a thematic of each song and as a backdrop for slowly unfolding post-rock structures. Gentle and delicate, yet masking a hard core of brooding, neurotic intensity. Powerful stuff.

Suicide - American Supreme

For the moment, I'd like to move away from the traditional emo/hardcore stuff I've been posting, and look at something a little stranger, and also a bit more recent. This post is kind of in connection with the latest post on Steady Diet, but really only in name.

Suicide's latest album, American Supreme, released in 2002, is really worth listening to. Suicide are most famous for their debut s/t album (you know, the one with the smeared blood on the cover) but since then they have continued to release some very interesting work.

Suicide exist outside of traditional music genres, although they can be described as being part of the 70's 'no-wave' movement. Really, they are a punk band without guitars and, listening to their records, I can feel that they have equally a 'hardcore' aesthetic and spirit. The term 'alternative' does absolutely no justice to the extremes which Suicide take their music to, and neither does it comprehend the extent to which they subvert and pervade 'pop'.

Suicide are two people: Alan Vega, who does vocals, and Martin Rev, who does instruments. Vega and Rev met, I think, in a New York art gallery. Soon the two were experimenting with the combination of tortured spoken word vocals and a really cheap drum machine. Suicide's first album can roughly be described as a demented, echoey Elvis crooning quietly over an unhealthy-sounding motorbike engine. Strangely enough, that same album was at the same time a beautiful collection of sweet pop songs; albeit ones which occasionally descended into anarchic violence, most notably 'Frankie Teardrop', possibly the first screamo song ever recorded.

But I'm not reviewing their first album here, merely referring to it to illustrate the progress of the band since. Suicide's sound and musical structure has remained recognizably similar, yet all the while adapting to the music of contemporary culture. Hence, while the first two records are recognizable as 70's electronic music (and are lauded/blamed for inspiring the electronica/new wave genre, e.g. Soft Cell), their 1992 album, Why Be Blue? is much more dance-orientated. And American Supreme, a 21-st century album by a definitively 20-th century band, draws heavily on - but what else? - hip-hop. Well - because they are from the 1970s - very funky hip hop (One track, 'Wrong Decisions' even has sampled horns... under the chorus line "Mom's not breathing"). Indeed, if you've ever wanted to hear hip-hop played like weird 70s electronica, this is very possibly the album for you.

Finally, a discussion of either this album, or of Suicide as a whole, would be lacking with some mention of the lyrical content. As you may guess from the cover, this album is very political, with songs like 'Televised Executions', 'Swearin' to the Flag', etc. If memory serves me right, 'Frankie Teardrop' followed the story of disturbed vet gone murderously insane. Suicide haven't exactly mellowed much since, if the intensity of this album is anything to go buy. The insert sheet has no lyrics, but rather (printed on an eye-wateringly intense orange background) a series of quotes from various celebrities (such as Iggy Pop, Guy Debord and Donny Osmond) and musings on the creative process, consumerism, fame and art. This is not your standard anti-capitalist manifestoism; rather, it's something much more challenging, philosophical and provocative. For example:

5; How can you think clearly in a record shop?
Pop, of course, is built on daydreams conjured up in suburbia. Pop comes from the outside looking in, from howling at the moon, from wanting a way out. Pop is a dream mass-produced, packaged and repackaged, replicated, copied and sold back to us. It is the sound of creativity spawned from boredom; a source of ideas raised only to be pillaged. Pop is the last gasp before the day job grabs you, a scream in the face of the nine to five, a futile alternative to washing the car. Pop is an inevitable failure, a second of brilliance and a lifetime of grey. Pop is disappointment in multiple.

or

12; Is suicide a solution?
A life caught in fragments is a life in which key moments are seized. In its unwholesomeness comes an expression of what it is to be alive, replete with defects, unevenness and disappointment. Here in lies 'shreds snatched from complete nothingness', a product of people caught in particular period of time. When creativity becomes a 'career choice', it becomes a forced irrelevance. Keep off the payroll.

Suicide - American Supreme