VVV – Endless – Review

VVV

Endless (Mute)
by Nik Rainey

Of all the American bands of the early punk era, Suicide, in keeping with its name, stood alone without its feet quite reaching the ground: with one man (Martin Rev) coolly wringing a chintzy drone from a broken Jap keyboard and another (Alan Vega) murmuring and burbling echoically in the foreground, they neither rocked nor rolled like bands were expected to do – at most, they kinda percolated a little. (I once taped their classic ’77 debut album for a friend on a declining non-console stereo with no Dolby switch, and I swear to God the tape hiss overpowered anything Rev had to play.) And yet, even in the tiny urban semicircles where CBGB’s heebie-jeebies reigned, Suicide’s function was pure rock’n’roll – that is to say, a total affront. Hell, even in Europe, where Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire had already switched on their share of damage (albeit while resting on a nice, distancing cushion of ironic so-far-left-it’s-right politics and Burroughsian parlor tricks, so any hackles they raised were the intellectual kind that tend to lack muscle tone), their mere existence frothed up more craws than anyone since Tristan Tzara literally pulled poetry out of his hat six decades before. (Pass the Dylan, I think I’m Greil Marcus.) Listen to that live-in-Belgium flexi that came with their first alb if you can find it – for sheer audience-baiting hostility, it makes Metallic K.O. sound like Hot August Night (and this in a country where all the biker gangs ride Schwinns). Maybe it was too raw a mixture – that reverby Elvis-as-Colonel-Kurtz sneer over that Farfisa-on-Saturn buzz (The Sun Ra Sessions?) may just have been too much for the great unwashed (and usually untoothbrushed) on the far side of the pond. (They were much easier to simply ignore over here, like the junior high school this country has become.)

But of course, like just about every differently-wired soul vilified in their own time, Suicide is now one of the indelibly cool names for sprained hipsters to hack up like so much generic-nicotine-laced phlegm, especially in Europa, and naturally, they waited for their original potency to dry up and smooth over (domo arigato, Mr. Ocasek). And just as naturally, the old masters want in on the action (one of them, anyway – though Martin Rev probably traded on his street cred to grab that dollar-an-hour raise at Circuit City). Which explains the existence of Endless, Vega’s “return to roots” album (if the misshapen, denuded weedlets that sprout from the cracks of Avenue A can be considered roots). Give Vega full marks for perverse chutzpah; instead of snagging some trendée technoweenies to hustle him onto the dance charts (so-called because the “posture ironically charts” would be too much of a mouthful), he capitalized on the one moment of lighthearted wit he’s had in his life and decided that, to make this project swim, he was gonna need a pair of Fins: two members of Pan Sonic (formerly Panasonic), the Scandinavian electro-gliders with two albums and a cease-and-desist order to their credit. Not an uninspired idea, either: they alone seem to be upholding Suicide’s old minimalist mantle, with compositions that usually sound like a few stray pieces of state-of-the-art-fag equipment murmuring shyly at each other. (Not only that, but the teaming also allows them to be inaccessible even in name, with an unpronouncably alliterative surname-string moniker that sounds like conjugating an obscure Latin verb.) An ideal pairing, it would seem, like chocolate and peanut butter; in the final analysis, however, it plays out more like unsweetened baker’s chocolate and that generic peanut butter that comes with two inches of oil at the top of the jar. Not that Endless is an abject failure; Vainio and Vãisãnen (Mika and Ilpo, respectively – and you can’t have enough CDs by guys named Ilpo, I always [read: never] say) do an admirable job of infusing their inertia with a heavy hit of agita, and at times work up a decent head of pixelated steam, and of course, Vega’s vision has been advanced and refined not a shmatte-wearing whit in the last twenty years; his lyrics still read like shorthand-laden leaves from Lou Reed’s steno pad, his vocals still claustrophobic hiccups in the tiniest echo chamber in the stereo lab, the whole mixture as pure an exercise in nihilistic nostalgia as inhumanly possible. And yet a crucial part of the original recipe is missing: that grimy super-urban garbage heart that was beating beneath the primitive drum machine tattoo all along, the desperate romantic impulse that produced such arterially-clogged valentines as “Cheree” and “Dream Baby Dream,” classic moments that were just as much a part of the Suicide experience as “Frankie Teardrop” (it’s worth noting that there are no “Frankie Teardrop” shrieks to be found here either, but that’s probably ’cause, at Vega’s age, they’d be immediately followed by very un-“Frankie Teardrop” coughing jags). Without that, the V’s are often left grinding away on a soulless succession of static (in both senses) repeato-riffs that neither enthrall, grip, nor throttle the way Rev’s Lower East Side buzzbombs could. (Then again, it’s probably not their fault; they are Finnish, after all. How many gritty films and songs about “the mean streets of Helsinki” can you think of?)
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