(TV) Never Too Late: 2006 NYC Verlaine Review

["Leo Casey" <LeoCasey@comcast.net>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/arts/music/20verl.html?ex=1177992000&en=10
bee6f35233d694&ei=5070


Rock Review
Tom Verlaine Gets Down to Basics at the Bowery Ballroom 

 
By JON PARELES
Published: May 20, 2006
Tom Verlaine's music lives in the interstices: the rhythmic spaces between
beats, the modal inflections within tonality, songwriting that lingers
between genres, and lyrics that sketch the gaps between real and surreal. At
the Bowery Ballroom on Thursday night, starting a two-night stand, he was
calmly mesmerizing, filling his songs with slinky suspense between the
lines. 

In a career that dates to the mid-1970's, Mr. Verlaine hasn't radically
changed what he does. He writes unhurried songs that usually have graceful,
wiry guitar parts and a drone at their core, with lyrics about the beauties
of disorientation and drift. Folk-rock, art-rock, post-psychedelia -
whatever they are, they're his. This year Mr. Verlaine simultaneously
released his first solo projects since 1992: "Songs and Other Things"
(Thrill Jockey), which provided material for the Bowery Ballroom set, and
"Around" (Thrill Jockey), a set of instrumentals that wanders from
mantra-jazz meditations to rock to hints of the Caribbean. 

Mr. Verlaine's band Television, which reunites sporadically, played regular
gigs at CBGB in its earliest days. He shared the punk urge to strip music
down to essentials. But his essentials were not what came to be known as
punk-rock; they were more subtle and more open-ended. Like the jam bands
many punks despised, Television and Mr. Verlaine's solo projects delve into
the processes of music in the moment: the variations within a riff, the play
of textures and tensions. 

His current band, which is starting a tour, uses two guitars, bass and
drums, like Television. It includes the stalwartly understated Fred Smith
(from Television) on bass, the unshowy and robust Louie Appel on drums and
Jimmy Ripp on rhythm guitar, who supplies each recurring riff for Mr.
Verlaine to play against. 

Mr. Verlaine's guitar leads didn't flaunt virtuosity by streaking above the
beat. They tugged against it instead: lagging deliberately behind, clawing
chords on offbeats, trickling around it or rising in craggy, determined
lines. The music was also a play of guitar tones; Mr. Verlaine could sound
rounded and bell-like or sharp and steely, and when he played linear solos,
he used quivering inflections that hinted at both ragas and Celtic music. 

Some songs expanded and mutated, like "Kingdom Come" from Mr. Verlaine's
first solo album, in 1979. Its chunky rock beat and major chords dissolved
into little trickling runs, returned more strongly behind a zigzagging lead,
then kicked into double time as Mr. Verlaine's guitar pealed and scrabbled
in a jubilant crescendo.

In a new song, "Shingaling," Mr. Verlaine and Mr. Ripp tickled high, darting
variations and deep twangs over a Bo Diddley beat as Mr. Verlaine sang, "I
remember when time was king/ Now it's just shingaling." During the generous
set, it never sounded as if the songs were being stretched. Mr. Verlaine was
just headed deeper inward, toward his kind of rock essentials. 
--------------
To post: Mail tv@obbard.com
To unsubscribe: Mail majordomo@obbard.com with message "unsubscribe tv"