Station

Albumbeschreibung

Alan Vega has always been over the edge rather than on the fringe. Indeed, for anyone who ever heard the first Suicide album -- and indeed many of his subsequent solo works -- Vega wasn't so much a fringe artist as a (pasty) flesh and blood incarnation of the voice of the underbelly of New York's secret tunnels under its subway system. In other words, in his twisted, hyperkinetic way, he was simultaneously the Elvis from Hell, the Ritchie Valens from the Dead Zone, and the satanic embodiment of Frankie Lymon. Vega was -- and has always been -- Dion's evil alter ego. Where Dion got smart and moved to Florida, Vega stayed on the mean streets of New York (where there are few mean streets left south of 110th). His lyrics were amalgams of serial killer fantasies, unholy taboo love, abject violence, and insane philosophical ravings that combined everything from newspaper headlines to religion to American mythic symbolism. Alan Vega was the scariest voice in rock & roll. The reason for the past tense is his Mute debut album, Station. Vega has always worked best with instrumental collaborators. On this 11-cut mess, he does all the sounds himself. Those sounds are reminiscent of lo-fi KMFDM/Skinny Puppy reject backing tracks, unfortunately. And Vega speaks more than he sings or yowls. This is industrial music that now mirrors (though doesn't come close to canceling out) what Suicide did -- they were ahead of their time in the 1970s, and now he (without budget tech machine master partner Martin Rev) is hopelessly late for any of this stuff to be interesting. Vega can be a fine poet, as on "Gun God Game," where his lyrics remain as compelling and psychotic as ever, but his singing and screaming are the other half, and no amount of crummy drum machines and terrible synth loops and overdubbed backing vocals by himself, Liz Lamere, and Dante Vega are going to compensate for the lack of musical focus. There's too much weight on Vega and he cannot concentrate on what he does best: yowl in a rockabilly-soul stutter that at its best can shake the walls of any county jail. "Crime Street Cree" has some decent Vega singing, though it never gets out of the sphere. Everything here, however, is utterly drenched in dated electronica and industrial trappings, and it's impossible to hear the man from the morass. It's hardly believable that machines could drown out that voice, but alas, it's true.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo