Tom Verlaine

On his first album after Television broke up, Verlaine’s songs don’t stray terribly far from the template he’d established, though they feel a little easier in their delivery; without the tension of the Television line-up, Verlaine plays it relatively loose here, or at the very least, as loose as an uptight New York boy could be. David Bowie would cover “Kingdom Come” in a year’s time; later, the Blue Aeroplanes would make the Velvets chung of Television-era offcut “Breakin’ In My Heart” their own. “Yonki Time”’s surrealism has always been charming, but the magic here is in “Last Night”, where Verlaine shows he’s a dab hand at quiet melodrama. Tom Verlaine as balladeer? Weirder things have happened…