Television

One of the most astonishing albums of the '70s, Marquee Moon emerged from the same CBGB's scene that bore Blondie, Talking Heads, Ramones, Patti Smith, etc. Television may never have been played on the radio, but the telepathic reverberations between guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd can still be felt today.

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. Blondie is a
quintet which juggles genres of fast rock, from a thick, Spector-ish vision of stre... More >

I know why people complain about Tom Verlaine's angst-ridden voice, but f*ck that, I haven't had such intense pleasure from a new release since I got into Layla three months after it came out, and this took about fifteen seconds. The lyrics, which are in a demotic-philosophical mode ("I was listening/listening to the rain/I was hearing/hearing something else"), would carry this record alone; so would the guitar playing, as lyrical and piercing as Clapton or Garcia but totally unlike either. Yes, you bet it rocks. And no, I didn't believe they'd be able to do it on record because I thought this band's excitement was all in the live raveups. Turns out that's about a third of it. (Grade - A+)