Bristol
13 November 2023
Reimagining Suicide’s legacy they go, Lydia Lunch clutching her double microphones like a praying mantis — one’s all reverbed echo, the other sounds like pulled sellotape. Her vocals incoherently fall and flail around, gift-wrapped in Marc Hurtado‘s steely squall. His inky yells adding to the action as the sound brutally lunges at you, slams and screeches in slippery synchronicity. At one point it sounds like an industrial blender full of splintering glass; the next, volatile vomit licking a jackbooted stomp.
Secretly wanted it to be more punishing volume-wise, but as a long time lover of Hurtado’s old band Étant Donnés and Lydia’s output, this onslaught is beyond satisfying, like finding new flesh in the familiar. The Suicide tracks are so bastardised I can’t even pin-point most of them: they feel raw, off the bone, and I only recognise “Ghost Rider”, “Harlem” and “Frankie Teardrop”.
Some tracks descend into a primetime Lydia rant on the fruitless pursuit of war to a skidding tyre-burn, the audience shouting back their solid “yeahs”. Early on she is killing you with her take on bland modernity. You can hear the spit on the mic as her words lacerate “You’re nothing more than a fucking commodity!” she screams, jabbing the air with an extended finger. Her confrontational eyes scan the audience — catch her gaze at your peril, her put-down stares are still stone-cold killer. Suddenly there’s a buzzing: Lydia has a go at the sound guy, she snipes out a defiant “I know how it should sound”. It’s quickly corrected and she restarts the show. When Marc’s beats hit they throb like a pent-up arterial, exploding in a barrage of bent-up samples and swooshing torque into which Lydia scatters Alan Vega‘s words. Recognisable rhythms hit, carrion-crow the room to be chewed gorgeously out of shape splatter-caked in pornographic moans and grappled yells.Theatrically tied to the moment, with chest-beating, crucified arms, Marc is a foil to Lydia’s physical stasis. His vocals like swirling phantoms around Lydia’s grounded cynicism and drawled defamations. They make a perfect combo, his howling seems to coax Lydia to twist the knife into the words, threading the threat of “Touch me… touch me” replacing Mr Vega’s romantic inclinations with something more malevolent, transforming “Harlem”’s big black city into something towering and scary.
The final track is immense, intense. The crowd cheer as that vivid “Frankie Teardrop” beat hits, here pumped and peeling, thrown into a helicopter’s whirring embrace. A murderous shrapnel-filled elegy with a sweaty “Hamburger Lady”-esque rasp. Marc shoving the mic out to catch the audience shouts of “Frankie”, both shooting their heads with finger guns, finally all crash-landing to Lydia wandering off stage waving the dry ice out of her way as she goes.An excellent show of force that instantly promotes a Suicide sound-tracked journey home.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
