Television Personalities
The Painted World

While searching for some songs about Television in the vast panorama of the Internet, I came across these truly eclectic Television Personalities. The album is dated 1984, but the atmospheres they manage to create are among the most diverse. One can find that blend of styles that belonged and still belong to the most varied artists experimenting with new ways of narrating and presenting their texts.

The opening song "Come and smell the roses" is very charming and relaxing with that certain something that makes it similar to any work of Lou Reed (who said "It's a perfect day"?). The next track is the title-track and is more lively, featuring the distorted voice of the singer, which somehow seems to repaint the world in a parallel manner to ours, but in an abstract way. The next song seems to have been used by Sonata Artica in "Replica" as the attack and verses are identical, although these belong to a completely different genre (and almost twenty years earlier) from the power metal of the aforementioned Finnish combo. "Bright sunny smiles" is composed in a rather clownish manner, as if trying to lift the listener's spirits, sung in a disjointed way to try to make one laugh or understand what the song is advocating, namely good humor despite the somewhat "depression" ending, which gives way to another fine, but very bluesy in mood. The main instrument is indeed the purely blues-style harmonica that accompanies and often overwhelms the singer's voice, which seems not to sing, but to paraphrase a story like "The end" by The Doors, but without Jim's delirious predictions and the band's journeys.

The following "A sense of belonging" is pleasant and more easy listening than all the other songs on the album. With "Someone to share my life with" you reach the sweetest part of the entire album with a voice that seems not to support the delicacy of the words enough, perhaps not to appear overly mawkish and sugary. "You'll have to scream louder" represents in my opinion the best piece of the album. Once again, it is the voice that dominates in expressing the desire for despair, which would trigger the urge to "scream louder". "Happy all the time" continues the cheerful song thread that should lift the spirits, but then the world always ends up bringing you down, left in suspense by "Bright sunny smiles". "The girl who had everything" seems to wink a lot at Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop & The Stoogies, while "Paradise estate" almost seems to push everyone and everything away from itself, leaving a stunning sense of solitude. The last track (Back to Vietnam) is presented in a rather bizarre way, as the sung parts are continually overlaid with a kind of news bulletins and reports, while the music is a revisitation of the 60s/70s sounds of the Vietnam war era.

In many ways, the songs and the style in which they are presented appear as a cross between Bob Dylan and Radiohead with the psychedelic supervision of a golden days Syd Barrett. Not coincidentally, the title of one of their works is "I know where Syd Barrett lives". From my point of view (listening) this CD is certainly exceptional with stylistic choices that are quite questionable, but truly spot-on in their context. It proves to be very experimental and many may find it senseless, but I really like it a lot.

Recommended for those who are open-minded in the musical field.