Mutator
Alan Vega's legacy is cemented with Mutator's unnerving and inimitable power
The late Suicide pioneer's wife Liz Lamere has unlocked the Vega Vault, spewing forth more NYC gutter rock and apocalyptic proclamations
In the '90s, Alan Vega was so prolific as a solo artist and collaborator that not everything he recorded saw the light of day. Sacred Bones begins their series of his archival releases with Mutator, an album he and his wife and collaborator Liz Lamere recorded in 1995 and 1996 but never released. A quarter-century later, the sessions were mixed into their final form by Lamere and Jared Artaud, a musician and friend who came into Vega's life in the 2010s and worked on his first posthumous release, 2017's harrowing It. Mutator isn't quite as apocalyptic as that album, but it still packs a punch. Like Vega's other solo work in the '90s, it finds him reclaiming the industrial-strength electronics he first explored with Suicide and pairing them with his stream-of-consciousness meditations and wild-man howls and whoops ("Muscles" is a prime example of his feral growls).
No one was better placed to viscerally document where New York was at in the mid-1990s than Suicide frontman Alan Vega. Downtown Manhattan had literally
Former Suicide frontman and all-round pioneer Alan Vega continues to thrilll from beyond the grave on excellent posthumous album Mutator