alan vega / the vacant lots

The absolute dogs danders this, latest ultra limited outing from the Fuzz club finds psych blues lounge legend Alan Vega of Suicide fame paired up with Sonic Cathedral dudes the Vacant Lots. There’s only 400 of these babies – 300 on white 10 inch slabs of wax with a further 100 on an even rarer clear variant. Vega needs no introduction around these parts, Suicide literally laid the blueprints for the minimalist electro punk landscape emerging from a shadowy sonic space that even the Velvets dared not frequent, their craft forged upon a mutant blend of torch noir scarred subliminal paranoia and primitive dub trance induced rock n‘ roll edginess, in truth they cut a distant kinship with the Silver Apples albeit with Vega at the helm were readily more acutely gouged in a psychotropic primal undertow that crooned, prowled and strutted like some demonic bad twin of Elvis, Gene and Vince. ‘Nike Soldier’ is Vega at his best doing what Vega does best – crooning and yelping like a spaced out renegade blues preacher man across a deeply hypnotic psychotropic futuro mind probing mosaic, reference markers would suggest a close blood line formed with Automat whose recent full length featured an equally out there Genesis P Orridge doing his best Will Burroughs. Vacant Lots apply their wares to the flip grooves, an album imminent on the ever cool Sonic Cathedral to come, this is an alternative take of ’mad mary jones’ and finds them tripping ever deeper into Sonic Boom Spectrum worlds though here shimmered and skinned up in a nifty 60’s shone garage psych framing which to these ears sounds not unlike the grooves these days nailed down to platters by the equally ultra cool Lucid Dream. Kind of essential then. http://www.fuzzclubrecords.com