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["Glenn Cooper" <glenncooper@austarnet.com.au>]

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Glenn C.


Verlaine is alive and well -- and still out there
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff  |  June 21, 2006
A funny thing happened to Tom Verlaine on the way to obscurity: Everyone
started name-checking his old band. Five years ago, Television was
remembered mostly by the graying punk faithful as the odd group out of the
mid-'70s CBGBs revolution -- forgotten guitar-hero artistes to Patti Smith's
rock shaman and the Ramones' blitzkrieg bop.
Then music critics began citing the Strokes' debt to Verlaine and Television
-- inaccurately, it might be added -- and it became knee-jerk journalism to
align every new astringent rock outfit with the boho boys of the Bowery.
Television's 1977 debut, ``Marquee Moon," appeared higher and higher on each
new list of the 100 greatest albums ever made, prompting the full reissue
treatment from Rhino. Television began reconvening for occasional live dates
 with new material even. And, by God, here's Tom Verlaine's first solo
material in 14 years.
With typical perversity, he has released two new albums -- one vocal, one
instrumental -- and I can say with all fairness that if you want to
understand why Verlaine may be the great lost rocker of his generation,
``Songs and Other Things" and ``Around" are not the discs to start with.
Newcomers should proceed instead to the still-vital ``Marquee Moon," then
move on to solo work such as 1981's bruising ``Dreamtime" and 1987's
``Flashlight," perhaps the man's most user-friendly moment in the sun.
Verlaine has never been interested in acting like a rock star, though -- now
less than ever -- and ``Songs and Other Things," the vocal disc, offers the
sound of an intelligent eccentric muttering to himself. He sticks the two
least-engaging tunes, an instrumental doodle called ``A Parade in Littleton"
and the grating ``Heavenly Charm," right up front as if daring the listener
to press on. The album needs to be listened to a number of times before its
pleasures reveal themselves, and the lyrics, as always, are allusive to the
brink of nonsense verse. You have to crack the thing like a walnut.
The meat's there, though. ``Orbit," the third cut on ``Songs and Other
Things," broods magnificently, and ``Blue Light" combines delicately plucked
guitars, onrushing passages, and Verlaine's wracked voice to timeless effect

Subsequent cuts drift deceptively only to come in for the sucker punch, and
if this artist may be the most self-effacing guitar god to ever walk the
earth, the clouds do part for fretwork of meditative intensity. When ``The
Day on You" drops into silence only to return with a bliss-inducing
soldering iron of a solo, Verlaine seems to be recalling his own rock 'n'
roll myth from a higher plane.
``Around," the instrumental album, is a simpler and more mysterious affair.
The 16 tracks work as pleasant ambient background music for dicing tomatoes
or dropping off to sleep but, on closer inspection, spread across a wealth
of genres: surf guitar (``Balcony"), calypso (``Meteor Beach"), bar-band
blues (``Wheel Broke"), trance jams (``Mountain"), and, in ``Rings" and
``Curtains Open," the sort of turbulent Arab-inflected improvisations
Television has been trying out in concert lately.
Taken together, ``Songs" and ``Around" don't constitute a comeback so much as
twinned postcards from a man still traveling his own solitary road.
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