(TV) Marquee Moon review on CDNOW

[Jim Kauffman <jkauff@earthlink.net>]

MM is the featured "classic review" on CDNOW today. The CD is "on sale" for 
a whopping 50 cents off.


Television's Indie Rock Landmark
By Pat Berkery
CDNOW Editorial Staff

Television
Marquee Moon
(Elektra)
The music industry was a different animal when Television was rewriting the 
physics of guitar-based rock and roll on New York City's punk scene in 
1977. By every sense of the modern definition, the music Television played 
was "indie rock," though the subculture of independent labels was 
practically non-existent. So the major labels -- who admittedly had no idea 
what to do with a band that funneled punk fervor and a skewed, jazz-like 
virtuosity into carefully orchestrated vamps -- came-a-courtin' when they 
heard the underground buzz.
Elektra signed Television and released its masterful debut, Marquee Moon, 
in early 1977. Despite a warm reception in the U.K., nothing happened 
stateside. Television never scored a hit, the album never charted, and it 
disbanded after the 1978 follow-up, Adventure. But in the ensuing years, 
Marquee Moon would establish itself as one of the landmark rock albums of 
all time, its lurching start-stop rhythms, guitar anti-heroics, and 
noir-ish vocal gasps etching the post-punk template such bands as Sonic 
Youth, R.E.M., and Pavement would cop from in varying degrees.
Marquee Moon sounds arty by virtue of the fact that it didn't sound like 
any of the records out in 1977. Not arty in an overblown, progressive rock 
sense, nor in a grad-school "post-rock" way. It came from an entirely 
different place than the Queens, the Zeppelins, and the Rolling Stones of 
the day: Unless you were part of the same NYC scene that gave birth to 
Blondie, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, Television probably sounded like it 
was from another planet.
The title track is a quasi-phenomenon unto itself. Ten minutes (very linear 
in some spots) of squiggly guitar figures acting as hooks; leader Tom 
Verlaine's barely in-tune vocal wail; deconstructed guitar cacophony from 
Verlaine and Richard Lloyd; and a coda that reintroduces itself like a long 
lost friend. If you were searching for a high water mark in art rock, 
"Marquee Moon" is the place.
The sound was spare, leaving plenty of room for the bone-dry drums and 
guitar and vocal shrieks to move air on the rave-up opener "See No Evil" 
and the goose-stepping "Venus." Television even turned balladry inside out, 
as the cascading "Torn Curtain" unfurls deliberately like a catharsis years 
in the making, yet over in seven sinuous, teeth-clenching minutes. Nearly a 
quarter-century on, it still sounds miles ahead of the curve.

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