‘The Second Album’: Suicide’s more polished masterpiece
When Alan Vega and Martin Rev released their self-titled debut as Suicide in 1977, they presented an off-kilter and confrontational take on both punk and electronic music that was like little else being created at the time. Repetitive, raw, and at times downright terrifying, it revealed a darker underbelly to New York’s thriving art scene that subverted tradition in almost every sense.
Reception to the album at the time was polarising, with some critics at the time hailing its ingenuity and fearlessness and others reviling it for its pretentiousness and morbid sensibilities, but over the years the general consensus has shifted towards praise.
While there is plenty of adulation reserved for Suicide, its successor, which was released three years later, was less favourably looked upon and is rarely mentioned to the same degree as the debut. The Second Album (or Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev as it was initially known at the time of release) isn’t by any means an inferior record, nor does it fail to live up to the inventiveness of the first album, so why does it not receive the same praise or have the same cult status as one of the greatest underground albums?
One person who recognises the album’s worth, however, is LCD Soundsystem founder and producer James Murphy, who in 2018 put the album forward as a ‘cult album you need to hear before you die’ for an NME-published list of 100 lost treasures. He acknowledges how it’s “not the record that everyone thinks of when you think of Suicide,” referring to the general preference shown towards the debut, but goes on to proclaim that “it’s a really remarkable record, and it kinda sets up what’s so great about their solo careers afterwards.”
With The Cars’ Ric Ocasek on production duties and seemingly greater attention being paid towards polishing their sound, there are many things that separate The Second Album from Suicide. There’s far less discordant humming emerging from the duo’s synthesisers and a greater range of sounds being produced, but that doesn’t mean it’s a complete departure from how the debut sounded.
“I think he made them a little more layered,” says Murphy of Ocasek’s production, “But it still retains a lot of weirdness and toughness.” The closing track ‘Dance’ has a pulsating rhythm that is reminiscent of Suicide opener ‘Ghost Rider’, but presents it in a way that almost predicts the advent of acid house. ‘Harlem’ is nowhere near as dark and disturbed as ‘Frankie Teardrop’, but it still retains a sense of unease while pushing the pained screams further back in the mix.
On the other hand, some tracks from The Second Album feel far more playful and show a lighter side to the band that was only briefly touched upon on the debut. ‘Sweetheart’ has a lilting rhythm and dreamy palette that is reminiscent of Julee Cruise, while ‘Shadazz’ sees the band experiment with an up-tempo bossa nova style that feels almost uncharacteristically jovial when pitted against their past output.
With the album having been reissued alongside a handful of non-album singles and bonus tracks in recent years, it’s clear that these sessions following the debut were far more productive and allowed Rev and Vega to hone their craft in a way that both retained their uniqueness but saw them develop beyond the purely primitive sound of their debut. Suicide were never at risk of phoning in their experimentation, and by this account, they wouldn’t ever have needed to.
