Alan Vega's music is not easily confused with Sugar Sugar by the Archies
It can safely be predicted that Alan Vega's Station will not prove to be everyone's idea of required listening. Only yesterday my teenage son dismissed the album as, "the sort of horrendous din that might have been invented for the sole purpose of torturing lunatics". Persuaded to listen to the album in full, my girlfriend concluded that it sounded like, "a gang of psychopaths building a wharf, the most frightening thing I've heard in my life." Stick those quotes on the posters, Blast First.
True enough, Station is not the easiest record to fall in love with, nor does it pretend to be. One hour of intimidating white noise, rib-caving rhythms, deranged beats and even more deranged vocals, it oozes venomous anger from every pore. It could well be the angriest album you've heard in your life.
Not that Alan Vega is any stranger to radical noise. As one half of Suicide, he spent the 1970s making music of such fierce confrontational zeal that audiences would attack him with axes and monkey wrenches. Many a show would end in a full-scale riot. Suicide's best-known song, Frankie Teardrop, spun a heart-warming tale of a man who murders his entire family and consisted of ten minutes of malevolent electronic pulses complete with the most terrifying screams ever committed to vinyl. Not easily confused with Sugar Sugar by the Archies, that wee beauty.
Apart from a brief flirtation with the mainstream in the 80s, Vega's solo recordings have determinedly clung to the furthermost cutting-edge and might just amount to the most disquieting and uncompromising body of work in the rock canon. Station, Vega's tenth solo release, sounds to me like his most radical musical statement to date. All the more remarkable when you consider that Vega has recently celebrated his 59th birthday. Outside the world of jazz, can we name any other artist in the musical field who has made their angriest and most radical work at that ripe old age?
Sure enough, there are artists who have enjoyed steep creative rebirth in the autumn of their years. Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash spring immediately to mind. As mercifully good-to-great as their later recordings have been, no-one in their right minds would argue that they rank among their most radical work. At the age of 61, Neil Young released Living With War, a musical critique of the Bush administration. Vega's Station could be described in much the same way. Whereas Young sounds roundly pissed off with the state of things on his album, Vega sounds absolutely livid. You suspect that, if he were to get any more steamed up, he'd be found lobbing grenades through the windows of the White House.
Any other contenders? Scott Walker maybe. Though, personally speaking, I'd file his more recent albums under "radical and unlistenable". Whereas, after repeated listenings, Vega's Station reveals itself to be a work of frightening beauty, compulsively listenable. I'm not sure my neighbours see it that way though. A friendly note came through my door this morning and it read, "Dear Jon, keep playing that screwy music and we'll have you committed." I bet you a pound to a gooseberry they'll see the light when I explain that Station is the most radical album ever made by a 59-year-old. That'll show the blighters, eh?
