VEGA, ALAN - Mutator

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). There are connections to Deuce Avenue's hip-hop inclinations and the claustrophobic fog of Dujang Prang, but Mutator is often more cohesive than the material Vega released in that era, and its focus feels more akin to later works like It. This relative restraint provides the perfect balance to Vega's experiments. The more unsettling Mutator's music is, the more at home he sounds, as on the stygian grind of "Filthy." On "Nike Soldier," a dystopic litany against corporate greed ("You destroy generations...you jump-start tragedies"), Vega's voice seems to come at listeners from all directions over synths that burrow and gnaw. However, Mutator gives nearly equal time to the gentler aspects of his music. "Samurai" sets his weathered vocals to melancholy ambiences that take the lead on the instrumental "Psalm 68," while "Breathe" lets the hope underlying his music surface in a beam of light. Easily as good as the music that he released when it was recorded, Mutator is an enticing first dive into the Vega vault that will whet fans' appetites for more. ~ All Music Review