FILTER REISSUES
Lightning striking itself: the master’s last three, cruelly undervalued, solo albums.
Tom Verlaine ★★★★
Warm And Cool/Around/ Songs And Other Things
REAL GONE. LP
IN 2006, Tom Verlaine told the New York Times that his life’s work was now “struggling not to have a professional career” and, by most measures, he was making a decent fist of it. In the final 31 years of his life, Verlaine released just three solo LPs and one Television reunion set, keeping his hand in with occasional Television tours and Patti Smith cameos. After his death in January 2023, it became apparent what he’d accumulated to distract him from making music: a collection of 50,000 books, sold off in a vast Brooklyn garage sale last August.
The obituaries following Verlaine’s death predictably focused on the first two Television albums, and his flowering as a cerebral revolutionary and stingingly precise guitar technician; a first-gen punk at aesthetic odds with most of his descendants. His solo albums – the six major label efforts that came fairly swiftly after Television’s demise, never mind the three low-key epistles from 1992 and 2006 – were mostly elided over.
But those last three albums, reissued now after a long period of unavailability, show how Verlaine’s mission stealthily endured, even as he tried to avoid the music business hustle. 1992’s Warm And Cool originally sneaked out in close proximity to Television’s self-titled reunion, an instrumental set recorded in two and a half days with bassist Patrick Derivaz and Television’s brilliant, jazz-literate drummer Billy Ficca. The prevailing mood is noir-ish, provisional, Verlaine’s tone fluctuating between needlepoint friction and spectral twang. Saucer Crash resembles a classically brittle Verlaine solo, isolated and recontextualised. Spiritual, meanwhile, is all lyrical flecks and meditative intensity – like ambient music constructed out of a Marquee Moon sample, or Michael Ro
