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What did punk leave for future generations? <<< 30 years of great music. Innovations upon innovations. New musical genres. New styles. Immense bands. Sounds never heard before. Incredible singers. So much experimentation. Punk was just the beginning of it all.

One of the most inspired and important albums in rock. It taught classic rock (the kind played with bass, guitars, drums, and songs with verses and choruses) to the new wave generation, taking from the classics only the most relatable aspects and discarding the overused ones. The result is a lean, essential, neurotic, sharp rock that has absorbed all the various blues and folk legacies, leaving no traces of psychedelia or the '60s, projecting itself into a new era. From the Feelies to the Dream Syndicate, from Echo and The Bunnymen to the Psychedelic Furs, countless new wave bands (both US and UK) have drawn inspiration from Television, especially regarding Verlaine’s guitar—one of the greatest innovators of the quintessential rock instrument. Not to mention the influence this style has had on certain post-rock (Polvo, for example). Furthermore, I believe that the points of contact with Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Dead Boys, in short, with other representatives of the early New York new wave, are more numerous than is commonly believed. Even though with different means (rock'n'roll for Hell, singer-songwriter for Smith, garage for the Dead Boys, funk for the TH), all these groups expressed the same feeling of fatalism, disillusionment, bitterness, mixed with pathos, that characterized that generation.

you never know if they are serial killers or just jokers; they are enigmatic deep in their DNA. <<< exactly: that of the Surfers is a game, but one that could end in tragedy.

I agree, Psycho, the VU were light years ahead not only musically, but also "politically." Regarding garage, I was referring to certain minor tracks, like Run Run Run and There She Goes, or things like WLWH and I heard her call my name (the latter, by the way, sounded extreme like the best MC5 would do only two years later, so Kramer & Co. could only sit back and bow to Lou Reed :-D). The fact is that in the face of something like Sister Ray, all definitions crumble. Garage, noise, psychedelia, no-wave, industrial music, punk, rock... everything loses (and at the same time gains) meaning in Sister Ray...

eheh...capital disco in the new-wave...irresistible melodies, delightful arrangements, and a Byrne in dazzling form (here almost perpetually in falsetto)...a fundamental record of the great season of '77, the starting point for much new wave in the years to come, especially that heavily influenced by funk, but also "mechanical" stuff like Devo...talking about disco-punk for the TH is limiting...they rewrote the history of rock, particularly of rock accompaniment (also benefiting from the sporadic and finely calibrated input of keyboards and other occasional instruments)...with this dazzling and inspired debut, they taught entire generations of musicians, from rock to electronic, to arrange songs in a synthetic, spare, essential, minimalist manner, yet extremely complex and sophisticated...the result is music that can carry the listener away, but at the same time has something that limits the pathos, that freezes emotional transport, that alienates, that disorients, that surprises, something rationalist...fun music, likable, but falsely comforting...deconstructed (and let's use this term, dear God!!!)

Beautiful lillone! It's not my thing, but I appreciate the review.

I missed it, damn!!! Great review, with a cherry on top, the Signorelli quote (that man, among many rants, occasionally left us some gems). And the Testament rocks!

Sorry for interrupting the discussion. For me, the only common element between Velvet and 13th Floor was the garage component. The fact is that the 13th Floor were among the leading figures of 60s garage, while the VU pushed far beyond... Moreover, there’s a certain environmental difference between the two groups: one thing is the dusty Texas of the rednecks, another is the underbelly of the Big Apple... Different environments = different sounds... Anyway, even the VU were psychedelic in a certain sense: Waiting, Heroin, European Son, Lady Godiva, Sister Ray, Gift and other songs of theirs can be defined as "psychedelic," due to the elongation of time, the breaking of harmonic barriers of the song form, the search for the trip... the fact is that in the VU it was about a "bad trip"... while with the psych bands of the West Coast or Texas one could speak of surrealism, for people like the VU (but let's also include the other "metropolitan" school, that of Detroit, so Stooges and MC5), we can speak of hyperrealism... In practical terms: in the West and South, people tripped to escape into another reality; in the North and East, people tripped to transfigure the very (degraded) reality in which they were stuck day and night.

TOTAL DISCO. Rock and Funk, Jazz and Electronic. It's got EVERYTHING. It's one of those rare albums that, on paper, could easily come across as excessive, redundant, flashy, and induce nausea halfway through, with all its syncopations, screams, and screeches... and yet... the guardian angel of inspiration watches over all ten tracks of this masterpiece, in a continuous renewal of wonder... Intensity and expressiveness always at peak levels; variety and homogeneity hand in hand; richness of solutions without dispersion; a perfect alchemy between instruments and sounds, the most radical and experimental side of new-wave... It's a hedonistic album in the noblest sense of the term, hedonistic in the Dionysian sense, Dionysian as devoted to reclaiming all those primal urges that everyday life relentlessly crushes us with. Best listened to as shock therapy after particularly stressful days. An extremely influential album (the Minutemen know something about it, as do the Birthday Party), managing to strike that balance between creativity and communicativeness that will be lacking in various epigones (for example: the Nation of Ulysses, intense, often inspired, but unable to avoid overload and verbal excess). You can hear in this album the kraut influence, in the electronic manipulation of many tracks (We are time is the most striking example, with instruments that seem left to their own devices and that continually change timbres... rhythms and harmonies destroyed... or Blood Money, light-years ahead of its time). You could compare it to the compatriots Gang of Four, who represent a more "accessible" version, or to Pere Ubu, who were equally eccentric and sophisticated, but more synthetic... That's enough, I've talked too much, sorry! :-)

Well... Believe is an anthem! "I am the way / I am the light / I am the dark inside the night"