Album: Suicide

American Supreme, Blast First

Their first studio album in 10 years finds the Seventies garage-punk electronica pioneers operating at the full extent of their power, blasting back with the kind of album that puts more recent "electroclash" poseurs to shame. Seamlessly accommodating modern sampling methods within their original hard-techno style, American Supreme boils with a fierce energy and subversive political anger, synthesist Martin Rev's relentless, itchy electronic pulses now allied to infectious funk grooves, turntable scratches and fanfare stabs of brass, like hip hop backing tracks. Would that more rappers were as inventive as Suicide vocalist Alan Vega, however: compared to the vapid, self-pitying clichés of guns, drugs, ho's and ghetto life that still dominate hip hop, Vega's impressionistic sci-fi streetlife raps are like apocalyptic missives from another world. Here, zombies run wild in Manhattan, the sky is on fire, and Berserko Joe discovers "the power of the jail" in tracks such as "Swearin' to the Flag" and "American Mean". At his best, Vega produces a kind of psychopathic beat poetry, picked out in striking lines such as "The death click is beatin' in my head and they're dancin' in their graves/ So spectacular!" and the mordant "Swear to the flag! It's your duty as we all burn!". Sometimes, he requires little more than a single title phrase, blurted out occasionally amongst a vast hall-of-mirrors of echo and phasing, as in "Dachau, Disney, Disco", to make his point. It may not be pretty, but for sheer exhilaration, rampant paranoia and imperious contempt, American Supreme has few equals this side of Marilyn Manson. Highly recommended.