Television are the apotheosis of guitar bands. Marquee Moon is deservedly the classic, and I’d go out to bat for the third, self-titled, album as well, which is very good but seems to have been forgotten. But the absolutely essential album is the Live At The Old Waldorf recording from San Francisco in 1978. Fantastic performance, and much better sound quality than The Blow Up.
Tom Verlaine’s solo career is fairly well known, but Richard Lloyd’s went much more under the radar. There are some treats in there though, with digging for
I was too young for Rites Of Spring, and too old for My Chemical Romance, but Texas Is The Reason were one of the leading lights of my wave of emo, alongside The Promise Ring and The Get Up Kids, and all sorts of other bands on Revelation, Jade Tree, Deep Elm, etc etc. One great album, a handful of singles and that was it. You can fit their entire discography on one CD (and Revelation did a few years back), but it’s all killer.
Steve Earle once said “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that” and he wasn’t far wrong. Dusty, parched, broken country music that speaks to the melancholy and the ground down, beautiful and bitter
Ted Leo is another artist from that amazingly fertile US punk / indie rock scene. He’s right in that sweet spot between Jawbreaker and Springsteen.
te’ are a Japanese act who play post/math rock with all the boring proggy bits cut out and replaced with blazing punk energy. I would dearly love to see them live, I bet they are fantastic. They also have a way with titles - this one translates as "Magic smoulders in the depths of optimism as the remnant of “sin” conceived by the collective unconscious of a million people”, from the album “Therefore, The Illusion Of Density Breach, The Tottering World “Forget” Tomorrow”. Try shouting for that one at a gig. Look, just hit play on the clip, it’s bloody amazing:
