Track of the Week: Television: Venus (1977)

If you don't have 'Marquee Moon', Television's 1977 debut album, I feel sorry for you. Seriously, you should stop whatever you're doing and go out and buy, beg, borrow or steal a copy of this album, because it will make your life better. Television were formed in 1973 in New York and got lumped in with the punk movement along with other great-but-not-really-punk-and-all-the-better-for-it artists such as Talking Heads and Patti Smith, presumably because they all played at the CBGB's along with the rockin' Ramones. They went through a number of line up changes, but eventually Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd would re-invent guitar music by eschewing pretty much everything that went before to create a delicate, poetic yet intensely visceral type of music that would have a huge influence on every band that followed, from the brain-haemorrhage noise-rock of Sonic Youth to the crystalline melodicism of Echo and the Bunnymen. Influential just doesn't cover it; Television rank up there with the Velvets in that if they hadn't happened, the dire consequences for popular music are simply unthinkable. Just close your eyes and breathe a great sigh of relief that they so definitely did.
I could have chosen any song of 'Marquee Moon' because, from the epic title track to the emotionally apocalyptic finale, every single song is unique, mercurial and brilliant. So I have chosen 'Venus', not least because it is the song that inspired Felt with both a name and a career. Television's musical dynamic was based around Richard Lloyd's virtuoso guitar playing and Tom Verlaine's untutored by just as exciting and expressive approach. As a result, both guitarists play wildly different but complementary guitar parts, which often manage to sound almost orchestral in their scope. In 'Venus', both guitars chime beautifully, and the expressive, unconventional solo is out of this world. Yet nothing feels showy or out of place: Television proved that long guitar solos, once stripped of blues cliché and prog rock excess, could be exciting and genuinely emotionally moving. Billy Ficca's drumming and Fred Smith's bass provide a solid rhythmic anchor and counterpoint for the two guitar heroes to weave around. Tom Verlaine's unconventional singing style fits the music perfectly, and his lyrics are abstract and poetic yet again with an emphasis on the emotional. In 'Venus', he speaks of the time he and Richard Meyers (later Hell of the Voidoids, but that's another story) bunked of school and set a field on fire. In the song, Verlaine is suddenly struck by his conscience, leading to the chorus' beautifully surreal image - well, you try falling 'Into the arms of Venus de Milo'. The language is simply beautiful - 'Broadway looked so medieval / It seemed to flap, like little pages / And I fell sideways laughing / With a friend of many stages.' And the way Verlaine sighs 'How I FELT' before the second chorus was enough to inspire a teenage Lawrence to form a band. This is a piece of music that is simultaneously able to bring you to tears and send a surge of visceral pleasure through your body. Television may never have come close to equalling the brilliance of their first album since, but then again, nor has anyone else much. 'Marquee Moon' serves as a reminder of what drew me to music in the first place, and why it's so important to me. Almost 30 years on, it stands as a benchmark of just how good music can be.

Bad Cover Versions: R.E.M.: Pale Blue Eyes

Before they signed to a major label and went through one of modern music's most soul-crushingly depressing slides into utter mediocrity, R.E.M. were a truly great band. But even truly great bands make mistakes, as this murdering of the Velvet Underground classic shows, available on R.E.M.'s 'Dead Letter Office'. The Velvet's 'Pale Blue Eyes' is the highlight of their self-titled third album, which proved that, behind all the detached coolness and feedback, Lou Reed was simply an unbelievably talented songwriter. Over its gentle drone, Lou tells the tale of a man haunted by the one he loves, despite the fact that she is already married. It is painfully intense, with a beautiful tune, and ranks as one of the all time great love songs, as Lou reveals, beneath his arch coolness, a man brought to his knees. Before the stultifying blandness of 'Everybody Hurts', R.E.M. were a band that had the emotional depth and musical courage to attempt a tasteful cover of this song. Unfortunately, it all goes horribly wrong from the start. Despite being capable of showing such emotional range, Michael Stipe just sounds like he's doing a pub karaoke version of the song, robbing the song of its potent emotional impact. The rest of the band are no less guilty, trading in the original's haunted droning for upbeat, jangly folk. The whole sorry affair's most cringe-worthy moment comes when the band enter the chorus - any pretence of subtlety is lost as the drums come crashing in, along with sunny harmonies. This is particularly depressing coming from R.E.M., as drummer Bill Berry was known for his command of subtlety, keeping his sticks to his chest and playing what best served the music; not to mention the quiet magic that Stipe and Mike Mills could weave with their unusual harmonies. I would expect such ham fisted nonsense from many bands, but really guys, I had come to expect better of you. Still, it's not as embarrassing as any of their recent albums.

Track of The Week: The Magnetic Fields: The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure (1999)

The Magnetic Fields is the brainchild of auteur Stephin Merrit, jaded and cynical romantic, in thrall to the Pet Shop Boys, The Beach Boys and The Smiths. Since their formation in the early 90s, Merrit has been single-mindedly chasing his muse, creating albums of perfect pop on the way.
'69 Love Songs' is Stephin Merrit's epic treatise on love, romance and the love song itself via his immaculately written electronic pop songs. Towards the end of this comprehensive, three CD affair but very much thematically at the heart of the whole enterprise, is 'The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure', a meta-pop masterpiece about the impossibility of writing love songs. In the song, Merrit imagines himself meeting Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of 20th century linguistics, on what he romantically calls 'a night like this'. De Saussure points out the utter futility trying to employ such blunt tools as language in order to portray the essence of something as complex as love, a sentiment which surely casts all pop music from the Beatles to Holland-Dozier-Holland as irrelevant and ineffectual in one fell swoop. Merrit cannot bear to hear this, and loses his temper and shoots the hapless linguist. The song is a witty and heartfelt defence of Merrit's belief that human language and music can be used to talk about love and, at the same time, symbolic of his struggle to express such a complex emotion and do justice to it purely through those tools. After all, this is partly what drove Merrit to create a three-disc A to Z of the love song and its various guises, a project which didn't exhaust all he had to say on the subject by any means. But ultimately, 'The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure' works because it is great pop music. The song is built around a catchy bass riff and luscious synth-strings, topped off with Merrit's affecting baritone and the occasional flurry of handclaps. The rhyme scheme is deliberately silly - 'Saussure / So sure / closure / bulldozer', and dry wit abounds - Merrit claims to be 'just a great composer / And not a violent man'. However, despite his heroic attempts, Merrit cannot escape de Saussure's claim that 'We don't know anything about love', which, as Ferdinand's fictional last words, come back to haunt Merritt again and again as the chorus of the song.

Track of the Week: Les Georges Leningrad: Georges Five (2004)

"At heart, Les Georges Leningrad seem like sincere people pretending to be ironic people pretending to be sincere." Pitchfork Media

Les Georges Leningrad are, as clearly as I can make out, a band of assorted French Canadian lunatics masquerading as a pop group - they call their music "petrochemical rock" - no really. Which basically means a mixture of spastic post-punk and joyously deranged No Wave experimentation. The band hide themselves behind numerous ridiculous facades, appearing in masks and giving contradictory and utterly daft replies to interviewer’s questions, which gives them valuable mystique which is hard to maintain in the age of information, but also clouds their motives. So who Poney P (vocals), Mingo (keyboards and guitar) and Bobo Boutin (drums) actually are, and what they are really up to, is anybody’s guess.
‘Georges Five' is their kind-of-theme song from their first album, 'Deux Hot Dog Moutarde Chou' - you couldn't make this up. Whatever I say next cannot possibly convey the sheer deranged oddness of the music, but I'm going to try anyway. Over a shakily played three-note bass-line and drums and atonal keyboard stabs, a woman with a cartoonishly high-pitched voice hollers unintelligibly, as if in great pain. She is joined at various points by a man who also screams incoherently at certain points - a sort of call and response of agony. The instruments are recorded normally, but the voices are recorded well into the red, creating a harsh, unpleasant effect as if both 'singers' were trying to communicate by megaphone over the band and rendering actually deciphering the lyrics - if indeed any actually exist - nigh on impossible. And to cap it all off, there is a fantastically deranged radio transistor solo just to stop things becoming too conventional. The recording is pleasingly lo-fi, and the playful atonality combined with a warped undertone of dread captures the spirit of the original No Wave movement brilliantly - I was genuinely surprised to find out that this was released in 2004 instead of 1979. And whilst you could accuse Les Georges Leningrad of being derivative of this era, it's been a while since I have heard a record so defiantly ugly, yet with a real sense of purpose. Like many of the old No Wave and post-punk bands, Les Georges Leningrad utterly ignore all the conventional rules of popular music, yet if you look hard enough, within their music there is a ruthless logic holding the whole thing together. In short, Les Georges Leningrad sound like Bis being mind-controlled by Cabaret Voltaire in a particularly malevolent mood. And if that's not a recipe for great music then I don't know what is!

Bad Cover Versions: Muse: Feeling Good

After my Belle and Sebastian Track of the Week feature, the Anti-Twee Police got in contact with me and threatened to revoke my amateur music critic licence unless I tone down the tweeness and go at least a week without going gooey eyed about bands of fey Gaswegians in junk shop clothes. So here is my new feature: a look at the most embarrasing, hamfisted cover versions in music history. Today, Muse murder a Nina Simone classic. Now, I know that she didn't write the song, but Nina Simone's incredible voice - sensuous and cal, yet full of joy and power and ultimately feeling - makes the song her own. On to Muse. Muse have based their whole career on the middle section of Radiohead's 'Creep' - you know, the awful bit with the load guitars where Thom Yorke moans 'Sheeeeeees climbing up the wooaoaaaaaahhhh!' or something like that - and then cramming every second full of ridiculous, high picthed screaching guitars, loud drumming and Matt Bellamy's histrionic screaching. Subtlety does not feature. So why the band thought that they could tackle this classic song is in itself something of a mystery, though I would suggest it might have something to do with Muse not being the brightest sparks on the planet. So, the song is converted into an awful space-rock heavy metal version. The original's delicate piano chords and string sections are replaced with hackneyed head-banging power chords. And Nina Simone's beautiful, unique voice is replaced by Bellamy's thin screaching - he even sings one of the verses through a megaphone. Since Muse have intrinsically no real understanding of dynamics - there is a 'quiet' bit, but because of the way the record is mastered, there is no real difference between that and the 'loud' bit apart from the number of instruments playing - the whole subtle build up of the original is lost. By the end of the sorry affair, one does start wondering if the whole operation was done intentionally by Muse because they hated the poor song so much.