Alan Vega
Alan Vega [Deluxe Edition]
THE VEGA VAULT PROJECT/SACRED BONES
One of the most impactful goals of The Vega Vault Project is to bring to the fore all of the lost music from the living catacombs of the late Alan Vega, pre-punk’s most menacing but well-meaning sonic marauder, poet, and high-priest screamer. And while in several incidences that’s meant Vega’s widow Liz Lamere and fellow crypt keeper Jared Artaud finishing what Vega started (e.g. 2024’s Insurrection), the pair kick off 2026 where Vega’s solo career began by remastering the wired-weirdly rockabilly of 1980’s spare-sounding Alan Vega (alongside its harsher follow-up, 1981’s Collision Drive) with a rare look into the artistic process via a collection of demos and scratch tracks.
Like the minimalist dialogue of his work with Suicide instrumentalist Martin Rev, Vega worked from a place of understatement on his self-titled debut—hollowed out and burrowed into with only guitarist Phil Hawk and a cheap drum machine as his collaborators. Demos are demos are demos are demos; every great collection and dissection of work beyond the original issue features them. What does it mean, then, to be less than skeletal, to strip down beyond that which is the skeleton itself? You get marrow. That’s what the demos of Alan Vega are: the stretched-spacious yet still clammily claustrophobic edema of “Ice Drummer,” where being “frozen by fear” never felt sadder, or the frisky, risky likes of “Speedway” and “Love Cry,” both sensually stirring moments made miniature.
Two of the best demos found here—ever-so-slightly drier on the echo-affected album versions—harken back to or precede some of Suicide and Vega’s finest, least frenzied signatures. As witnessed throughout Insurrection (and on Suicide’s self-produced post-9/11 statement American Supreme), there’s a sense of prescience to be found on the demo version of “Fireball,” and the clarity of intension when Vega shouts out his antagonists, those “burned-out maniacs holding dynamite” that you might’ve found storming the Capitol on January 6. Then there’s the stark, beautiful endgame of “Lonely,” a crooned-shakily ballad on solitude, a soliloquy in silver and gray, in league with Suicide’s epically rolling classic “Dream Baby Dream.”
Completists like me might wonder if a demo for the thumping, post-Elvis “Jukebox Babe” exists, and that’s all well and good. This deluxe edition of Alan Vega suits us just fine for now, until the demos of stuff like Saturn Strip, Cubist Blues, and Endless spill out from the woodwork.
