Alan Vega, Alex Chilton, Ben Vaughn – Cubist Blues

Album Review by Duncan Harman | 25 Nov 2015
Album title: Cubist Blues
Artist: Alan Vega, Alex Chilton, Ben Vaughn
Label: Light in the Attic
Release date: 4 Dec

“At the time, I didn’t fully realise how unique the Cubist Blues experience was,” said Vaughn of his 1994 collaboration with Suicide’s Alan Vega and the late Alex Chilton (Big Star). Now re-released (and deserving of a far larger audience than it originally received), the scuzzy inclinations and solitary lightbulb feel of this transcends any fear that they didn’t make the most obvious of trios.

Instead, something murky. Semi-improvised and unpolished... and delightful with it, with Chilton’s guitar and shards of cold-edged synth alognside Vega’s vocals – particularly on tracks as languid as Freedom and Too Late – arriving directly from a 3am street corner on the Bowery. And while references to the protagonists’ respective back catalogues do occasionally skulk closer to the mic (the album closes with a version of Suicide’s Dream Baby Dream, reimagined through the ennui of an empty bottle), there’s something behind this swathe of end-of-evening, New York City blues that never feels forced or phony; a record that makes you wish they’d recorded far more together.

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