Half Alive

Performer: Suicide
Producer: Cynthia Fetty
Distributor: Ryko Distribution

Notes: This collection contains demos and live material recorded between 1974-79. Suicide: Alan Vega (vocals); Martin Rev (various instruments). Includes liner notes by Lester Bangs. All tracks have been digitally remastered. Personnel: Alan Vega (vocals). Audio Mixer: Wayne Vican. Liner Note Author: Lester Bangs. Recording information: CBGB (1974-1979); Horseshoe Club, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (1974-1979); Marquee, London, England (1974-1979); Suicide Home Studio (1974-1979); Sun Dragon Studio (1974-1979). Photographer: Ebet Roberts. Unknown Contributor Role: Martin Rev. There was an aesthetic revolution implied in the coupling of Alan Vega's reckless rockabilly howling and the hypnotic buzz and drone of Martin Rev's keys, and that revolution in sound birthed (perhaps unwittingly) two primary schools of synthesized rock: wimpy, gutless new wave duos and the painful dissonance of bands like Skinny Puppy, Foetus, and the later Chicago Wax-Trax scene. For better and for worse, Suicide enabled the industrial revolution. Half Alive is an essential reissue of the original ROIR cassette from 1981, compiling extremely rare early demo material and live tracks from 1974-1979. It's a mesmerizing, confrontational listen, and even more importantly - when contextualized in that time period, that harsh and beautiful juxtaposition of futuristic minimalism and anachronistic crooning (imagine Gene Vincent cornered on a mixture of quaaludes and speed), is confounding. Vega's scream is as damn reckless, damn frightening, and as full of abandon as a Stooges live show from the early '70s. Suicide went on to record a handful of indispensable albums before splitting up and reuniting innumerable times. If nothing else, this collection documents the peculiar fury of proto-industrial music prior to its eventual emasculation and/or reconfiguration as the millieu of studio hounds and gothic make-up artists. ~ Patrick Kennedy

Q (9/00, p.131) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...Compelling and primeval. Fractured, primitive and recorded live all over the shop...capable of raising the dead....A dumb-genuis classic." The Wire (8/00, p.57) - "...Frighteningly intense. 'All Night Long', recorded in Toronto in 1979 is definitive Suicide..."

As Suicide, New York City's Alan Vega and Martin Rev created a type of music unlike anything else going on around them in the punk era. Combining Vega's punk/futurist Presleyisms with the electronic squeaks and squawks of Rev's keyboards and rhythm machines, Suicide created a sinister yet strangely joyous noise that inspired everyone from the Cars to the 21st century Electroclash movement. Though they'll forever be identified as part of the downtown NY no wave scene of the 1970s and early 1980s, they've periodically reunited in the decades since.

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