![]() ![]() ![]() But he structures his compositions around these spooky, spare riffs, and they stick to the back of your skull. (The chorus of “Prove It” repeats, to a delightful sprung-reggae beat: “Prove it/Just the facts/The confidential” a few times.)Īll this could serve to distance or repel us, and taken with Verlaine’s guitar solos, which flirt with an improvisational formlessness, could easily bore. When one can make out the lyrics, they often prove to be only non sequiturs, or phrases that fit metrically but express little, or puffy aphorisms or chants. The songs often concern concepts or inanimate objects - “Friction,” “Elevation,” “Venus” (de Milo, that is) - and when pressed Verlaine even opts for the mechanical over the natural: in the title song, he doesn’t think that a movie marquee glows like the moon he feels that the moon resonates with the same evocative force as a movie marquee. Television is his vehicle for the portrayal of an arid, despairing sensibility, musically rendered by loud, stark repetitive guitar riffs that build in every one of Marquee Moon‘s eight songs to nearly out-of-control climaxes. Leader Tom Verlaine wrote all the songs, coproduced with Andy Johns, plays lead guitar in a harrowingly mesmerizing stream-of-nightmare style and sings all his verses like an intelligent chicken being strangled: clearly, he dominates this quartet. Marquee Moon, Television’s debut album, is the most interesting and audacious of this triad, and the most unsettling. The Ramones make rousing music and damn good jokes, but they’re in a bind: the hard rock of this group is so pure it may be perceived as a freak novelty by an awful lot of people. They’ve also lost just a pinch of their studied rawness: whether this is a sign of maturity or sellout is a matter for debate. The Ramones are as direct and witty as before. The other is Deborah Harry’s utter aplomb and involvement throughout: even when she’s portraying a character consummately obnoxious and spaced-out, there is a wink of awareness that is comforting and amusing yet never condescending. One is producer Richard Gottehrer’s adroit echoing of decade-old pop songs, replete with hooks and innocent melodrama. Two things save Blondie’s music from a lack of focus and sincerity. Absolutely anything, from joke to political manifesto to hoax, can be ascribed to them. The group’s original material has no trouble yielding to this malleability of meaning since the songs are so broad in theme - the plots of “Kung Fu Girls,” “Rip Her to Shreds” and “The Attack of the Giant Ants” are exactly what their titles suggest: the aural equivalents of tabloid newspapers. It’s an interesting combination and forces all the songs on Blondie to work on at least two levels: as peppy but rough pop, and as distanced, artless avant-rock. Everything is sung by Deborah Harry, possessor of a bombshell zombie’s voice that can sound dreamily seductive and woodenly Mansonite within the same song. These bands achieved their initial notoriety while playing in the same place (an esophagus of a bar called CBGB, in lower Manhattan) and have been lumped together with other habitués of this joint as purveyors of “punk rock.” In their self-consciousness and liberal open-mindedness, these bands are as punky as Fonzie: that is, not at all.īlondie is a quintet which juggles genres of fast rock, from a thick, Spector-ish vision of street crime called “X Offender” to a thick, Who-like vision of womanhood called “Rip Her to Shreds.” Blondie is for the most part a playful exploration of Sixties pop interlarded with trendy nihilism. ![]()
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