Record of the Week: Suicide

This is Suicide's first album (1977). I know, I already posted Alan Vega but this is not the same thing. It would be like comparing The Birthday Party to Cave's solo albums. Not a trace of resemblance right?

I can't stress the importance of this shit enough. I would probably not even listen to music if Suicide hadn't been. The first song I heard was "Frankie Teardrop". I was at some rock music festival and after three days of excessive everything, I was kind of neurotic. You could say the song did not enhance my mental health.

This was a long time ago and I know now that they have made far better songs than that. I want to harm everyone who relates Suicide only to "Frankie Teardrop". Listen to the brilliant "I Rememeber" or "96 Tears" (yes I know it's not on the original release) and you'll know why.

Don't listen to anything they've released after 1980 though. It will distort your Weltanschauung. In a bad way. Yeah, and I don't get that? Why do bands continue to release album after album when they've lost their true north ages ago?

Listen to the album on Spotify.

Hail The Expers!!!

Hello friends and fiends. Got no idea what to write about tonight so what the hell, I'll just tell you a story. Several years ago some drunk dude with his fly open approached me on the tram. Conversation went like this:

- Hey Alex, let's record something someday blah blah!!

- OK man eeehhh..... (whothefuckareyou??)

- Gimme your number! Is this my stop, huh?

- Well, eh, I don't know. I don't know where you live.

He got my number. It was Mikael Romanenko. He lived in the motherfucking ghetto and I got robbed there once on my way home after recording. There's not much to say about those sessions. I remember Mikael telling me once that he never used get drunk that often before he met me. And that I was his biggest expense. 

You can hear some of the stuff we recorded on "Bring on the Heartache". Not very brilliant tracks but the point was, we were a band. And the point of being a band is that you can drink and gamble and raise hell all you want. All under the pretence that you are a band.

Joakim Proos joined us for our first gig. I think we had the drums and some other sounds on a laptop or an iPod. After the show someone said it was "Magical!". Well, it wasn't but it's the only comment I choose to remember. 

It was fun back then. Stealing shit and being rude. And the older you get, the better you get. That's the case with us anyway.

So if you're not in a band I think you should start one. You'll have the time of your life and who knows, you might even make a decent drinker.

Record of the Week: The Cure - Seventeen Seconds

You were sixteen, draped in black, smoking cigarettes and skipping class. You were misunderstood and getting drunk at 11.00 AM on a Tuesday. You were a pretentious little pest and you listened to The Cure. 

Just like me then. Down with the dark side, all depression and suicide. No one else understood the hopeless nature of things.

Well now it's twelve years later and I still like to get drunk in the morning but I don't listen to The Cure much. But when I do I find it kind of hard to stop. I'm not talking about the soulless crap they've tortured us with the last twenty years or so, I'm talking about Seventeen Seconds (1980). The most atmospheric album ever made. Very simple songs with very weird, dissonant guitar and a hardly audible synthesizer. The drums could be played by a twelve-year-old and the bass is, well, basic.

I'm writing this sentence just so I can hyperlink Secrets and At Night.

So why not get a cheap bottle of booze and join the rats under the bridge with this excellent piece of lament?

Listen to the album on Spotify.

Record of the Week: Swans - Children of God

Children of God? A gospel record? Or some home made spiritual crap by inbred biblebelters maybe? No man. You don't know Swans.

Listen to the first one and a half second of the opening track "New Mind" and you know this is the heavy shit. Not the unlistenable horrifying hollow noise of earlier releases, but still. Listen to "Beautiful Child" and be afraid. Typical Michael R. Gira lyrics, it is written from the view of an insane child murderer. Shouting "This is my life, this is my damnation", he explores the killers conflicted mind.

Apart from a few pretty boring acoustic tracks, Children of God (1987) was the perfect end of an era for Swans. They also released a live version of the album called Feel Good Now. After that they tried to hit the charts with the horrible The Burning World (1989), not a very great effort.

Yes, I do believe this is a spiritual record, just not in the way we are used to.

Trivia: I saw Swans live in fucking 1997. And I have a signed copy of Michael's book "The Consumer". And about 22 records. Sod off.

Listen to the album on Spotify. (2 CD Reissue w/ World of Skin)

Record of the Week: Alice Cooper - Special Forces

I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re thinking Desmond Child. You’re thinking entire spin-off albums to generally pointless “Friday the 13^th” sequels. You’re thinking MTV smash-hits with hockey choruses.

I’m the one thinking wrong?

Wait. I know. You’re thinking 1973. You’re thinking vintage shock rock. You’re thinking on-stage decapitations with trans-gender undertones.

It’s all a lot of bull anyway as soon as you take into account the forgotten gems of Alice’s early 80’s, sandwiched between more critically acclaimed and commercially successful periods of his career. Forgotten, that is, in the sense that the main man himself doesn’t even remember recording them. He was down and out in those days, Mr Cooper was, dressed up as a geisha from beyond the grave and barely registering what was going on around him. There are TV shows from the time, and they all make no sense what so ever.

The music, on the other hand, is nothing short of spectacular. We’re talking high octane rock n’ roll with an illogically crafted new wave production and no-nonsense nonsense lyrics of a quality only someone genuinely out of his mind can muster. “Special Forces” (1981) is actually so incredibly great I need to listen to it any time I catch myself thinking of the album. Which happens every once in a while, and has happened ever since I first indulged myself with a serving of this meaty dish of a record almost 20 years ago.

From the ambiguously semi-ironic opening track, to the insanely catchy closer “Vicious rumours”, this is high end rock music from the lowest low life of the era

Listen to the album on Spotify.