Here's an excellent 24 bit vinyl rip of an album that's a necessity to anyone who enjoys listening to beautiful guitar work. It also happens to be one of the best albums that came out of a year, 1977, when music completely blew up. Marquee Moon only gets better with age, and if there's a chance you've never heard it, now would be a good time to fall "straight into the arrrrrrrms of Venus De Milo..."
From Ken Tucker at rollingstone.com:
Marquee Moon, Television's debut album, is the most interesting and audacious of this triad, and the most unsettling. 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. 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. 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.
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 chorus of "Prove It" repeats, to a delightful sprung-reggae beat: "Prove it/Just the facts/The confidential" a few times.)
All this could serve to distance or repel us, and taken with Verlaine's guitar solos, which flirt with an improvisational formlessness, could easily bore. But he structures his compositions around these spooky, spare riffs, and they stick to the back of your skull. On Marquee Moon, Verlaine becomes all that much better for a new commercial impulse that gives his music its catchy, if slashing, hook.
Television treks across the same cluttered, hostile terrain as bands like the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, but the times may be on the side of Verlaine: we have been prepared for Television's harsh subway sound by a grudging, after-the-fact-of-their-careers acceptance of those older bands.
At their best, these three bands do indeed have things in common: a lack of pretension plus an abundance of vigor and adventurousness that have obviously been stoked by popular manifestations of print, film and TV: comic books, detective stories, science fiction, westerns and their attendant stock figures — hoods, dicks, cowboys, aliens: heroes, super and anti. Rock has always traded on a certain amount of this spirit — the naming of a band is just as stirring to its members as the sewing of his first cape is to a fresh superhero — but these three bands use this popular art in a way very few rock & rollers have done — with consistency and accuracy. (The Kiss boys read comics and even dress like them, but their secret identities are those of four businessmen dedicated to taking as few risks as possible.) The Dolls did a bangup job on a song like "Bad Detective" but they never approached the sinister precision Tom Verlaine achieves to wrap up the scenario of "Torn Curtain"; "Prove It" is a paean to a never elucidated "case" Detective Tom has "been workin' on so long." Blondie owes its moniker no less to its peroxide-soaked lead singer than to the marriage partner of Dagwood Bumstead. But in the wisecracking snipes of Deborah Harry, the band knows damn well it has found an image closer to that of a feminist Marvel Comic for the ears. The brutality and willful cruelty of the Ramones' music can find its direct antecedent in the films of Samuel Fuller; Joey Ramone writhing out "Commando" is the real soundtrack for Fuller's yahoo, prowar nose-thumber, Steel Helmet.
The lyrics of these bands are rather beside the point — they are drowned out by the instruments and secondary to the gradations of angst projected by all three lead singers' technically poor voices. But the best of the few lyrics one can decipher have a pulpy richness — certainly not conventional rock sentiments or even examples of "good writing." Verlaine yowls: "I remember/How the darkness doubled/I recall/Lightning struck itself." Is this profound imagery, or just a particularly ripe balloon of dialogue from a Silver Surfer comic book? I would tend toward the latter opinion, even as I am convinced that the song, "Marquee Moon," is a small masterpiece, and the album a medium-sized one.
Technical Information:
Artist: Television
Album: Marquee Moon
Year: 1977
Audio Codec(s): FLAC8 Split Tracks
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: FLAC 8 Split Tracks
Avg. bitrate: 2953 kb/s
Sample rate: 96000 Hz
Bits per sample: 24
Channels: 2
File size: 968 MB
Length: 00:45:23
Tracklisting:
01. See No Evil (3:58)
02. Venus (3:53)
03. Friction (4:45)
04. Marquee Moon (9:58)
05. Elevation (5:10)
06. Guiding Light (5:36)
07. Prove It (5:04)
08. Torn Curtain (6:59)
Special thanks to petr_aprel for the original rip.
(Our preferred 24-bit audio players are Foobar2000 and J. River. They're both free.)
Marquee Moon Megaupload Link