Search - Suicide :: Half Alive

Sacul Repooc

saculrepooc | New York, NY United States | 06/27/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Suicide are as close to the real thing as it gets. I LOVE THIS CD. It makes all other electronic punk outfits look like B-movies. Marty Rev and Alan Vega invented a unique new genre and defined the parameters to which it could be extended. Every electronic band exists because of these joined-at-the-hip downtown NYC punk-rock scavangers. The ROIR cassette was great...the Cd even better with 3 bonus tracks from the same era and the original classic liner notes by Lester Bangs you can't go wrong."

AAAAAAAAAAUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHHEHHEHHEHHEHYAHYAHYAHYAH!!!!

Mark Bychowski | houston tx | 12/18/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"i bought this initially on cassette in austin while picking up furniture for a friend. on the way home, she decided to take a nap, so, needing to pass a couple of hours & being fairly sleepy myself, i needed a little music to keep me going. i unwrapped the cassette, popped it in, & sat back as the leader tape rolled. what followed was the sound best described in the title for this review: no music, just alan vega heavily echoed YELLING AT ME. snapping it off instantly, i listened to pleased to meet me instead, because, come on, shut up, guy! only after i got home & played the rest of the tape was this music redeemed because this RULES! half alive is apt: there's a lot of early demos which are fuller & more cluttered than what shows up on suidide's first 2 albums. essentially some simple heavily chorused synth lines and reverbed vega vocals repeating the title of the song over & over again. (by the way, this isnt placing judgement or denigrating the tunes, merely describing them). the live stuff is much more raw & sloppy, back when audiences quite disliked what they were having to listen to. alan vega is totally in his element therefore; harlem 2, sister ray says, & going to las vegas are all delightfully manic & unhinged, & all night long (which is really just dance with a different title) has alan really frustrated that he's pleading with someone to dance all night long with him, but it clearly isnt happening. to sum up: not for beginners, but man oh man if you loved the first couple albums, you will LOSE IT to hear this. epilogue: the aforementioned cassette that started this review eventually got eaten by my car's tape player, but before breaking, it would fitfully struggle through the tape heads, resulting in a stop & start painfully slow marching gruel of keyboard grunts & deep drawn out screams. almost as good as the real thing, i tells ya."