Friday, September 5, 2014

Suicide - A Way of Life (1988)


Look, I know, their first album is phenomenal, and absolutely deserves to be heralded as a classic, but why do so many people act like it's the only fucking Suicide album? Their other records are so good! A similar thing has happened to lots of bands -- first album is a groundbreaking classic, and no one fully gets down with anything they do afterwards -- but not to the degree of Suicide. Like, Psychocandy is the only JAMC record that gets accolades, but at least people acknowledge their other albums. (For the record, I love Darklands, Automatic, and Honey's Dead.)

Anyway, here's A Way of Life, which has sparse, electro-punk that's much in the same vein as their first record ("Wild in Blue", "Sufferin' in Vain"), an uneasy, girl group-style love song worthy of a David Lynch film ("Surrender"), a synth-driven re-imagining of Elvis-esque rock 'n roll ("Jukebox Baby 96") and an anthemic piece of driving almost electro-industrial ("Rain of Ruin"). And that's just the first half. Get your shit together, fans of awesome music.

Track listing:
1. Wild in Blue
2. Surrender
3. Jukebox Baby 96
4. Rain of Ruin
5. Sufferin' in Vain
6. Dominic Christ
7. Love so Lovely
8. Devastation
9. Heat Beat

My heart is a prison

7 comments:

  1. Posts like Gerry Rafferty's Sleepwalking and this are pointers to what makes the mighty O Hum so great. It's often the uncelebrated works that hold the real keys to what an artist is all about. I'll take Lou Reed's The Raven over Transformer every day. (But then I'm one of only 7 people in the world who prefer Television's second album to their first.) Which is a long winded way of saying thanks for the un-obvious touchstones.

    Apropos of nothing: Scott Walker's collaboration with SunnO))) is due out soon. The mind boggles in anticipation.

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  2. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS BLOG!

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  3. Excelent!!! Thank you very much!!!

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  4. First of all thanks for the gift of thousands of hours of great music.
    I tried to download but file does not exist in the server, do you still have the files? :)

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  5. This is the original release of 1988? Or is the remastered version of 2005?

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