this album is what happens when punk rockers make a prog record, no?
bands directly influenced by this television "marquee moon" (according to my ear) include:
- suede - violent femmes - franz ferdinad (best rock band of the 00's suck it white stripes YEAH!!!) - weezer - the replacements - RHP (man does elevation sound like something off of californication)
so of course i think it's great music. prog punk! how cool! but i'm still at a loss to remember any of the specific songs off of this album. maybe that says more about me than about the band, but this isn't really a "i want to listen to music album," but more of a "i want to smoke weed and sit in a room enveloped by sound with an album on repeat for a weekend analyzing" kind of album.
on my second listen through, i really have to ask: did gordon gano rip off his entire schtick from these guys? half these songs sound like femmes doing a jam band impression.
(or more accurately, femmes sound like television doing a bob dylan impression)
if you issue a full Vinyl Alert (which you did), you cannot double down on a Right of First Refusal, holding out until we've both thrown down. i'm thereby charging you with Contempt of Blog, and until you get down SOMETHING about this album, from me you won't get comment 1.
i've listened to it twice through, and i'm ready to talk, but i'm afraid it's you first, son. gotta read the rules before you come out to play.
no. i said i want to hear what you both have to say about it, without my biased opinions influencing your fresh ears. i stand by that, and not some fake rule you made up for the purposes of pissing me off at pre-coffee 9am. dont make me up and delete that first comment.
if you'd like me to type something right now, well, i'll say that i think the album speaks for itself. i dont think its prog at all, but the definition of prog really deserves its own post. and although i'm sure all the bands schnitzel listed above listen to marquee moon, i dont think any of them sound like television, except suede. interestingly schintzel, of all the bands i know of that you listen to, REM actually did a cover of 'see no evil,' i think its a bonus track on a reissue of one of their earlier albums.
no need to get pissy over bylaws, these were chosen at the town hall meeting last year and the omnibus has been available upon request at the main library AND in the Documents and Filings section of the website. ignorance does not equal innocence!
i actually wanted to hear your notes first because this kind of music is so far removed from my experience, that my impressions find no real purchase. it's very difficult for me to understand what i'm listening to here.
i'll lay down some basic responses though. first, i'm confused why a band would want to go to such lengths crafting pretty music if the singer is just going to warble and yell over it. i don't DISLIKE it, but at some point someone had to say "don't really 'sing', you know ... just sort of talk the lyrics in a singsongy way, and be sure to wail kind of painfully, as though you're stuck in the moment of falling terribly ill".
it seems to me the guitars are the focus here, and not the singer. they're the ones really working and putting out something worth listening to. seems like a couple of dudes with a whole big bushel of little tricks and ditties that they've saved up over years of lonely holings-up in humid LES apartments.
having duly noted the guitarist's abilities, i will go on record as saying that they've finally encouraged me to codify my theory of there being a new musical scale -- call it the Altpunk Scale. this is any scale -- usually closest to the pentatonic -- composed or performed by someone who is just trying to get from Note A to Note B, simply playing those notes inbetween which, through experimentation or vague sense of musicianship, "kinda sound okay".
thing here is, not all notes in a scale are created equal. they each have their own properties whereby they are more or less effective on a certain beat, or over a certain voicing of the chord beneath. some notes are much less important to the scale, and as such repeating these ancillary notes too often creates a weakening of the harmony and a sense of awkwardness. no confusion -- these guys are good, and know what they are doing in a certain way, and what they do works perfectly for this music. i'm just laying the groundwork for the extended, insufferable and lecturious diatribes on the role of training on musical taste which i am almost certain to start busting out as we encounter more and more music like this. i'm talking diagrams and everything, do not look forward to it :P
i have more to say but for now i'll leave it at that. oh, and i am amazed that a band can make their guitars sound like singing birds (marquee moon), and mewling kittens (torn curtain), and still be considered "punk".
whoa, looking at my above post, did i really write that this morning? huh. musta been because i was grumpy. and woke up next to roseanne barr. who had baked me burnt gingerman cookies. while wearing an ominous armband.
maybe i should listen to my grandma and go a little easier on the crystal meth. [oh and that moustache isnt fake]. interestingly, all of last night started at that town hall meeting, which was where i originally got roseanne's number. maybe i should have listened to grandma a year ago....
but i digress. television. i've listened to this album so many times. got it on vinyl in college and love it. tom verlaine's vocals were never an issue for me. i can see how some might be put off by it, but i've never felt that way. every guitar note is perfect, every song great, some are even completely amazing. i heard them, loved them, and never looked back. hell, i even have a t-shirt with this album cover on it, and i would definitely wear it more if i hadnt shrunken it in the dryer by accident. so yeah, i am very biased and probably not the best person to ask for an objective view on this album. but i'll write what i can about it.
prehistory: these dudes moved to nyc in the early 70s and started a proto-punk band. they were making music seriously for four years and couple bassists before this album came out. during that time they got better and better and better at their instruments. i've heard some early demos, from '75 maybe, and it was a few of these songs in more primitive states. and they just kept working on the songs and making them better. punk back then in the mid 70s didnt mean what punk means today. i'm not sure if i can even describe what 'punk' meant at any point in history, but lemme try. you basically have a few aspects - the 'idiot' aspect, as popularized by iggy pop, the 'macho' aspect as popularized by the ramones, the 'political' aspect as popularized by the sex pistols, and the 'art/drugs/musical noise' aspects popularized by the velvet underground [no wonder they were so significant]. oh, and dont forget 60s garage [like the stuff on that nuggets compilation]. of course, there was tons of overlap. but television just incorporated the 60s garage aspect with guitar solos, which the velvet underground had established as being ok. television is a little more 'modal' and a little less noisy, but they were also in some ways a maturation of other punk styles. hell, television would frikin jam out. marquee moon could last over 17 minutes. i've heard some versions where the whole band was just absolutely epic on this song, improvising it to its emotional limits, pulling as much tension and incredible guitar work out of it as possible. i know that by todays standards, jamming out is not punk, but hey, the velvet underground did it all the time in the 60s. 'sister ray' was 17 minutes on the album, and could go up to 45 minutes live. also, television played at CBGBs all the time in the mid 70s. is blondie punk? jesus, no! but they all played CBGB, so they all get lumped into the easiest label possible. i hope that helps to explain why they are considered punk.
as sarge said, this is a guitar album. there are two guitarists, each one amazing at taking solos. the shorter, more intense solos [see no evil, elevation] are richard lloyd, and the longer ones [longer solo on marquee moon] are tom verlaine. also the drummer, billy ficca, is simply phenomenal. i think i read somewhere that when they went into the studio to record this album, the engineer, andy johns [who was the same guy that recorded led zeppelin], spent an entire day getting the drums to sound like the drums on the led zeppelin albums. then the band came in, unanimously thought it sounded terrible and wasnt at all what they wanted, and forced him to change it, totally pissing him off. i believe it. despite all the guitar work and the fact that the band broke up one album later due to egos, you dont really hear the egos in the music nearly as much as you do in led zeppelin. you hear skill and virtuosity, but more than that you hear restraint in respect to the song. i think its also a lyrics album. i think tom is an incredible lyricist. i've heard these lyrics described as 'symbolist,' but to me 'noir' makes more sense. they're dramatic, vague, and come from somewhere that i can only describe as mature. these arent pop songs about teenage love. they're written by someone who is well-read, or at least wants to give that impression. they're as complex as any lyrics i've ever heard, and i really like that lastly, its a songwriting album. and by that i mean the chords and the 'layout' of the songs. what makes these songs great is hard for me to describe, but i'll try. first of all, there are no fillers. its a solid album from beginning to end. you can tell that all songs have been labored over and well-analyzed. they're all pretty different, too. i can kinda see how schnitzel would compare this to weezer - EVERY song is full of tension, making the album an epic emotional rollercoaster. the band was not afraid to explore harmony way beyond most other punk bands of the time. they also are masters at holding back and then letting it all out when need be, which is a sure sign of musical maturity and, lucky for us, definitely adds to all the tension.
tense/beautiful/energetic songs coupled with difficult/intelligent lyrics and guitar/drums virtuosity...thats a recipe for success in my book. and they pulled it off so perfectly. to me, this really is perfect album. and as i said, i'm biased. i was hoping either of you could throw some major criticism wrench into this lil' musical doomsday device we got here, completely altering my weltanschaung and getting me to really really think. because aside from the vocals which actually dont bother me at all, i really dont see any flaws. but at the same time, i've never been in a mindset when listening to this album to look for flaws. i just immediately liked it, 3 listens later i loved it, and have continued to love it ever since. to oversimplify, this is the sound of punk having matured...and it happened all the way back in 1977.
my first time through this album i found it QUITE BORING. and for the most part, RATHER PREDICTABLE (with some notable exceptions). they do a lick, then they do it over and over and over. oscillate between this chord and that chord, this chord and that chord.
it was only my second time through -- knowing that i had to have missed something -- that i had the a-ha moment. i realized this was not only guitar music for guitarists (like you both), it was also band music for bandmembers (like you both, and notably, NOT ME).
so i listened to it again as a member of a band. sort of pretending. and i swear to god, everything fell into place. suddenly i appreciated all the precise, sometimes even intricate guitar work. and i appreciated the literate lyrics (i agree with D on that). but it really was only once i imagined rehearsing these songs -- or even having a member come in with these ideas, that i understood how special these songs were.
i am very, very confident that had either of you first listened to this band before you were ever in bands yourselves, and moreover, before you had ever picked up a guitar, your impression would not have been as immediately positive.
this is a great assessment, phanto. and this is a key difference between the way you tend to listen to music and the way i do. i hear this album and i'm instantly in awe of how each member of the band wrote his part and all of those parts worked so damn well together.
you listen to this and from a lone composer point of view, it probably isn't so amazing. but that's the majesty of rock...so many cooks in the kitchen, and yet the deliciousness of the dish!
pitchfork's top 100 of the 70's + top 100 of the 80's, considered, scrutinized, explored, assailed, defended, appreciated and deprecated, fussed over, held up high, kicked to the curb and held back up again. education by fire and a middle finger to disdain. tea, anyone?
VINYL ALERT - i'll be listenin to this sucker on a good ol' record player.
ReplyDeletei wanna read both of your untainted reviews before i add in my two cents.
this album is what happens when punk rockers make a prog record, no?
ReplyDeletebands directly influenced by this television "marquee moon" (according to my ear) include:
- suede
- violent femmes
- franz ferdinad (best rock band of the 00's suck it white stripes YEAH!!!)
- weezer
- the replacements
- RHP (man does elevation sound like something off of californication)
so of course i think it's great music. prog punk! how cool! but i'm still at a loss to remember any of the specific songs off of this album. maybe that says more about me than about the band, but this isn't really a "i want to listen to music album," but more of a "i want to smoke weed and sit in a room enveloped by sound with an album on repeat for a weekend analyzing" kind of album.
at least, that's how it strikes me.
on my second listen through, i really have to ask: did gordon gano rip off his entire schtick from these guys? half these songs sound like femmes doing a jam band impression.
ReplyDelete(or more accurately, femmes sound like television doing a bob dylan impression)
dboy --
ReplyDeleteif you issue a full Vinyl Alert (which you did), you cannot double down on a Right of First Refusal, holding out until we've both thrown down. i'm thereby charging you with Contempt of Blog, and until you get down SOMETHING about this album, from me you won't get comment 1.
i've listened to it twice through, and i'm ready to talk, but i'm afraid it's you first, son. gotta read the rules before you come out to play.
no. i said i want to hear what you both have to say about it, without my biased opinions influencing your fresh ears. i stand by that, and not some fake rule you made up for the purposes of pissing me off at pre-coffee 9am. dont make me up and delete that first comment.
ReplyDeleteif you'd like me to type something right now, well, i'll say that i think the album speaks for itself. i dont think its prog at all, but the definition of prog really deserves its own post. and although i'm sure all the bands schnitzel listed above listen to marquee moon, i dont think any of them sound like television, except suede. interestingly schintzel, of all the bands i know of that you listen to, REM actually did a cover of 'see no evil,' i think its a bonus track on a reissue of one of their earlier albums.
no need to get pissy over bylaws, these were chosen at the town hall meeting last year and the omnibus has been available upon request at the main library AND in the Documents and Filings section of the website. ignorance does not equal innocence!
ReplyDeletei actually wanted to hear your notes first because this kind of music is so far removed from my experience, that my impressions find no real purchase. it's very difficult for me to understand what i'm listening to here.
i'll lay down some basic responses though. first, i'm confused why a band would want to go to such lengths crafting pretty music if the singer is just going to warble and yell over it. i don't DISLIKE it, but at some point someone had to say "don't really 'sing', you know ... just sort of talk the lyrics in a singsongy way, and be sure to wail kind of painfully, as though you're stuck in the moment of falling terribly ill".
it seems to me the guitars are the focus here, and not the singer. they're the ones really working and putting out something worth listening to. seems like a couple of dudes with a whole big bushel of little tricks and ditties that they've saved up over years of lonely holings-up in humid LES apartments.
having duly noted the guitarist's abilities, i will go on record as saying that they've finally encouraged me to codify my theory of there being a new musical scale -- call it the Altpunk Scale. this is any scale -- usually closest to the pentatonic -- composed or performed by someone who is just trying to get from Note A to Note B, simply playing those notes inbetween which, through experimentation or vague sense of musicianship, "kinda sound okay".
thing here is, not all notes in a scale are created equal. they each have their own properties whereby they are more or less effective on a certain beat, or over a certain voicing of the chord beneath. some notes are much less important to the scale, and as such repeating these ancillary notes too often creates a weakening of the harmony and a sense of awkwardness. no confusion -- these guys are good, and know what they are doing in a certain way, and what they do works perfectly for this music. i'm just laying the groundwork for the extended, insufferable and lecturious diatribes on the role of training on musical taste which i am almost certain to start busting out as we encounter more and more music like this. i'm talking diagrams and everything, do not look forward to it :P
i have more to say but for now i'll leave it at that. oh, and i am amazed that a band can make their guitars sound like singing birds (marquee moon), and mewling kittens (torn curtain), and still be considered "punk".
whoa, looking at my above post, did i really write that this morning? huh. musta been because i was grumpy. and woke up next to roseanne barr. who had baked me burnt gingerman cookies. while wearing an ominous armband.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bytheway.tv/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/roseanne_heeb01.jpg
maybe i should listen to my grandma and go a little easier on the crystal meth. [oh and that moustache isnt fake]. interestingly, all of last night started at that town hall meeting, which was where i originally got roseanne's number. maybe i should have listened to grandma a year ago....
but i digress.
ReplyDeletetelevision.
i've listened to this album so many times. got it on vinyl in college and love it. tom verlaine's vocals were never an issue for me. i can see how some might be put off by it, but i've never felt that way. every guitar note is perfect, every song great, some are even completely amazing. i heard them, loved them, and never looked back. hell, i even have a t-shirt with this album cover on it, and i would definitely wear it more if i hadnt shrunken it in the dryer by accident. so yeah, i am very biased and probably not the best person to ask for an objective view on this album. but i'll write what i can about it.
prehistory: these dudes moved to nyc in the early 70s and started a proto-punk band. they were making music seriously for four years and couple bassists before this album came out. during that time they got better and better and better at their instruments. i've heard some early demos, from '75 maybe, and it was a few of these songs in more primitive states. and they just kept working on the songs and making them better.
punk back then in the mid 70s didnt mean what punk means today. i'm not sure if i can even describe what 'punk' meant at any point in history, but lemme try. you basically have a few aspects - the 'idiot' aspect, as popularized by iggy pop, the 'macho' aspect as popularized by the ramones, the 'political' aspect as popularized by the sex pistols, and the 'art/drugs/musical noise' aspects popularized by the velvet underground [no wonder they were so significant]. oh, and dont forget 60s garage [like the stuff on that nuggets compilation]. of course, there was tons of overlap. but television just incorporated the 60s garage aspect with guitar solos, which the velvet underground had established as being ok. television is a little more 'modal' and a little less noisy, but they were also in some ways a maturation of other punk styles. hell, television would frikin jam out. marquee moon could last over 17 minutes. i've heard some versions where the whole band was just absolutely epic on this song, improvising it to its emotional limits, pulling as much tension and incredible guitar work out of it as possible. i know that by todays standards, jamming out is not punk, but hey, the velvet underground did it all the time in the 60s. 'sister ray' was 17 minutes on the album, and could go up to 45 minutes live. also, television played at CBGBs all the time in the mid 70s. is blondie punk? jesus, no! but they all played CBGB, so they all get lumped into the easiest label possible. i hope that helps to explain why they are considered punk.
as sarge said, this is a guitar album. there are two guitarists, each one amazing at taking solos. the shorter, more intense solos [see no evil, elevation] are richard lloyd, and the longer ones [longer solo on marquee moon] are tom verlaine. also the drummer, billy ficca, is simply phenomenal. i think i read somewhere that when they went into the studio to record this album, the engineer, andy johns [who was the same guy that recorded led zeppelin], spent an entire day getting the drums to sound like the drums on the led zeppelin albums. then the band came in, unanimously thought it sounded terrible and wasnt at all what they wanted, and forced him to change it, totally pissing him off. i believe it. despite all the guitar work and the fact that the band broke up one album later due to egos, you dont really hear the egos in the music nearly as much as you do in led zeppelin. you hear skill and virtuosity, but more than that you hear restraint in respect to the song.
ReplyDeletei think its also a lyrics album. i think tom is an incredible lyricist. i've heard these lyrics described as 'symbolist,' but to me 'noir' makes more sense. they're dramatic, vague, and come from somewhere that i can only describe as mature. these arent pop songs about teenage love. they're written by someone who is well-read, or at least wants to give that impression. they're as complex as any lyrics i've ever heard, and i really like that
lastly, its a songwriting album. and by that i mean the chords and the 'layout' of the songs. what makes these songs great is hard for me to describe, but i'll try. first of all, there are no fillers. its a solid album from beginning to end. you can tell that all songs have been labored over and well-analyzed. they're all pretty different, too. i can kinda see how schnitzel would compare this to weezer - EVERY song is full of tension, making the album an epic emotional rollercoaster. the band was not afraid to explore harmony way beyond most other punk bands of the time. they also are masters at holding back and then letting it all out when need be, which is a sure sign of musical maturity and, lucky for us, definitely adds to all the tension.
tense/beautiful/energetic songs coupled with difficult/intelligent lyrics and guitar/drums virtuosity...thats a recipe for success in my book. and they pulled it off so perfectly. to me, this really is perfect album. and as i said, i'm biased. i was hoping either of you could throw some major criticism wrench into this lil' musical doomsday device we got here, completely altering my weltanschaung and getting me to really really think. because aside from the vocals which actually dont bother me at all, i really dont see any flaws. but at the same time, i've never been in a mindset when listening to this album to look for flaws. i just immediately liked it, 3 listens later i loved it, and have continued to love it ever since. to oversimplify, this is the sound of punk having matured...and it happened all the way back in 1977.
my first time through this album i found it QUITE BORING. and for the most part, RATHER PREDICTABLE (with some notable exceptions). they do a lick, then they do it over and over and over. oscillate between this chord and that chord, this chord and that chord.
ReplyDeleteit was only my second time through -- knowing that i had to have missed something -- that i had the a-ha moment. i realized this was not only guitar music for guitarists (like you both), it was also band music for bandmembers (like you both, and notably, NOT ME).
so i listened to it again as a member of a band. sort of pretending. and i swear to god, everything fell into place. suddenly i appreciated all the precise, sometimes even intricate guitar work. and i appreciated the literate lyrics (i agree with D on that). but it really was only once i imagined rehearsing these songs -- or even having a member come in with these ideas, that i understood how special these songs were.
i am very, very confident that had either of you first listened to this band before you were ever in bands yourselves, and moreover, before you had ever picked up a guitar, your impression would not have been as immediately positive.
this is a great assessment, phanto. and this is a key difference between the way you tend to listen to music and the way i do. i hear this album and i'm instantly in awe of how each member of the band wrote his part and all of those parts worked so damn well together.
ReplyDeleteyou listen to this and from a lone composer point of view, it probably isn't so amazing. but that's the majesty of rock...so many cooks in the kitchen, and yet the deliciousness of the dish!