Hell is real, suicide often seemed to suggest, and it sounds like an anguished Elvis Presley crooning for dear life, half-submerged in the rapids. For much of his time on Earth, Alan Vega was also drowning. Long before he became the lead singer of Suicide, he braved a bleak version of New York, sleeping on sidewalks and subsisting on dollar tuna sandwiches. He saw the possibility of expression piercing his often barren reality—an itch that led him to the gallery, then the studio, then the No Wave circuit, then the nightmares of innocent gigs. (Come for the music, stay for the masochism: If you were lucky, the sharp object she used to cut his chest could have been yours broken wine glass!) As Alan Suicide, a short-lived moniker that preceded his music career, he exhibited elaborate stacks of light bulbs and wires, like Rudolf Schwarzkogler's pieces without the corpse. The music he made as a soloist felt essentially similar: murky hellscapes that combined styles like '50s rockabilly and '80s synth, turned into concoctions that popped into your head, often for reasons you couldn't quite place not even a finger.
Over the years, it's gotten a lot easier to spot that finger — perhaps because his stuff sounds so familiar in retrospect. There are lines to be drawn between Suicide and certain successors, be it Crystal Castles or Death Grips, but those connections, particularly with Vega's late-career work, are rooted more in approach than attitude . He was a man of ideas, like most denizens of the information age, and decades before the groundbreaking albums of SoundCloud or Kim Gordon, or the harbingers of hip-hop's distortion, he gave form to the impulse to combine these ideas so loud and unforgiving, as possible. That's what it does Uprising, his latest posthumous release, such a fascinating listen: Here's this guy who grew up on Elvis and the Stooges with weird, freaky aphorisms over pounding drums and ASMR jet fighters. As unrelenting as it is, it also sounds like he's had a blast.
Since his death in 2016, Vega's estate has bolstered a scattered catalog of simpler collections, their shared turmoil less diluted by the happy-go-lucky demeanor of his early efforts. Uprising unearths 11 punishing, industrial lost recordings from the late '90s, throwing his brilliant vision and grim reality into direct battle. Most of the time reality wins. There's something jarring and refreshing about his gothic, growling – “Oh, angels bleed.” “Where's the light?” “Oh, the words don't exist”—on “Mercy,” a trench race over a downtempo track that explodes like bombs. Vega was never so much a singer as a drawer. On songs like “Sewer” and “Murder One,” he rustles out disturbing sayings, somewhere between roadie and mythical doomsday prophet.
