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Rating: I can't be around people. I mean, I really can't be around them: it's a structural limitation of mine that I can't overcome. Now I'm here writing these lines to share with you what I think about this album, but who knows why I'm really doing it. It's much more credible that it's simply a writing exercise, something purely self-referential, rather than a search for contact or sharing. I don't know. Maybe I want you to read me and tell me how great I am. Or maybe I just want you to read me. Or maybe I don't give a damn, and just writing is enough for me.
I don't even know which of these three possibilities is the most concrete, the true one that really has meaning, and frankly, I don't know which is the most humanly worst, the one that most shows signs of egocentrism and consequently insecurity.
Anyway, I've met certain people who believe that unless you are a great and recognized music connoisseur (which in most cases means you're a kind of dinosaur who writes or used to write for 'Il Mucchio'), then you can't really talk about music. But then they tell you that Tom Verlaine breaks the boundaries between progressive music and punk or new wave because technically, he had nothing to envy from guitarists in bands like King Crimson or, who knows, even Pink Floyd.
Here. In my opinion, someone who claims something like this doesn't understand a damn thing. In my opinion, technically, on a purely academic level, Tom Verlaine never had much to say. Sure, he's been playing guitar for forty-forty-five years to make a living, I imagine he could teach thousands of tricks even to seasoned jazz musicians or guitarists with a classical background, but if you ask me for a purely technical judgment, I would say that Tom Verlaine doesn't know a damn or doesn't care much about pure technique.
This doesn't mean that Tom Verlaine isn't a good guitarist, quite the opposite: simply comparing him to Robert Fripp, just to name the first name that comes to mind, makes no sense at all. We are talking about two completely different things.
And please don't take this comment of mine as criticism of Robert Fripp, who I honestly care little about, but that's not the point of the matter.
The fact is that Tom Verlaine is absolutely repetitive in his musical constructions. The 'castles' he builds in an album like 'Marquee Moon', which is the one everyone always refers to when they talk about Tom Verlaine (he has actually released relatively interesting works in the last decade, I even had the opportunity to see him play live alone and it was truly a great experience, while the times I've seen him with Television I've been bored just like many other times at concerts - in the sense that I get bored very often) are always constructed around the same sonic solution. Which is fine, it's a conceptual idea that works perfectly and makes his sound in some way peculiar and - not only - greatly inspiring for many other guitarists who followed him. But, mind you, his way of playing, seemingly so 'vast' and seeking open spaces, is instead very self-referential, almost like those delta blues musicians who seem like mountain bears for how they are attached to the guitar, all tightly hunched over with the guitar almost entering their esophagus and they lament. They lament and cry because they are black and poor and because they have conflicting passions inside them and need to exorcise the demon. And the same goes for Tom Verlaine in the end. If you hear him play, it's evident: there's nothing academic about it. Even Tom Verlaine is a whiner like most rock and roll icons. We are all whiners.
Only Tom Verlaine was and is as lean and hollow as the profile of his Fender Jaguar or Jazzmaster or whatever it is: it seems to me that he now mostly plays a Telecaster.
At this point, does it make sense in any way to try to imitate Tom Verlaine and try to be like him?
I myself wrote that his way of playing was and is self-referential but at the same time was greatly inspiring for a bunch of musicians from the past and still is today.
Among these, I include Chris Forsyth, who with his Solar Motel Band (Peter Kerlin, Shawn Edward Hansen, Ray Kubian, Jeff Zeigler) released a new LP on No Quarter Records last August 25, in which he once again revisits in many passages of the songs the same style of Tom Verlaine, who is evidently his main reference point. Together, concerning the work in question, with certain Ry Cooder fascinations and obsessive rhythms in perfect kraut-rock style like NEU!
The album title, 'Dreaming In The Non-Dream', is typically psychedelic and clearly refers to a certain new-age and psychedelic culture that Forsyth feels and claims to be its bearer. The album conceptually pretends to bring together new-age culture and 70s psychedelic rock with a certain Orwellian conceptual science fiction and the beat generation, thus configuring itself as a 'summa' of American counterculture of the last century. A proposal as grand as it is perhaps banal, predictable, and inevitably, in my opinion, ends up in a big nothing.
Not that this album is truly bad, to be honest: defining it this way seems objectively forced, wanting to strike at all costs against a musician who is, however, very skilled and intelligent and who in any case ultimately intends to emulate all things that I also like a lot.
Just that the two instrumental tracks 'History & Science Fiction' (the most markedly Television) and 'Dreaming in the Non-Dream' (the most kraut) end up being in a way boring and repetitive in the long run but without causing any particular hypnotic effect. So much so that I would say that the best of the two tracks is probably the first where certain guitar triumphs are indeed successful.
The other two tracks, on the other hand, seem almost completely detached from the context.
'Have We Mistaken the Bottle for the Whiskey Inside?' referring to a distinctly US 70s rock and roll and giants of the tradition like the Grateful Dead or even Neil Young, completely dissociates from the sounds of the other two tracks; 'Two Minutes Love' explicitly recalls a certain Ry Cooder imagery from 'Paris, Texas': it's practically a kind of interlude. Only that in this - short and limited to 300 copies - album it stands at the end.
I don't know. It isn't an album conceived to be something unforgettable. Perhaps it is almost experimental work for Chris Forsyth to test the waters and see in which direction to take the band. However, the final impression is that he doesn't have any precise idea on the matter. Meanwhile, returning to the issue of 'self-quoting' - as Woody Allen said, I think, but maybe I'm wrong - I think there's no better example of this album here where, in the will to refer to precise and determined reference points, Forsyth and his companions completely forget who they are in the end and get lost in an unspecified glimpse of the State of Pennsylvania or thereabouts.
Tracklist
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