Cover

Tom Verlaine’s embrace of eighties production stylisation is a bit puzzling at first, but it achieves something profound for his writing – everything is lighter, and the songs feel untethered, floating out there. You can hear it in the washy synths of “O Foolish Heart”, but it’s also part of what makes “Rotation” so deliciously playful, and “Let Go The Mansion” so sweetly sinister. The songs on Cover are woven together, made up of tiny interlocking parts; a glittering, lingala-esque guitar riff here; a clipped drum machine pattern there; oblique, confused narratives that hint at experimental cinema (one song here is named “Dissolve/Reveal”) as much as they do rock’n’roll.