Marquee Moon is one of the biggest pre-cum albums of all time. After just four songs, Television blows its glorious load all over your face. The remainder of the album is exactly like post-sex exhaustion - it's unfocused, it's messy, it's completely flaccid. As the final guitar notes of the song "Marquee Moon" ring out and fade, you can feel a palpable sense of disappointment and inadequacy coming on. You were right there, on the verge of ecstasy, but -someone- got a little too excited.
I've had Marquee Moon rattling around the old music collection since I was a junior in high school. Several times throughout the following years, the idea of keeping it or selling it for like, maybe, four dollars became a point of serious contention. There was a lot of hemming and a lot of hawing and a lot of forgetting all about it, but ultimately I decided to keep the album. Those first four songs held on to me for dear life and now? Now I'm stuck with children I'm extremely proud of and illegitimate run-off that I'd just as soon put up for adoption.
The first half of Marquee Moon - "See No Evil", "Venus", "Friction" and "Marquee Moon" - is an absolute thrill. "See No Evil" and "Venus" feature a tornado of guitar chimes, which splatter and invert upon arrival at their respective choruses. "Friction" is a short but sticky blast of energy, while "Marquee Moon" is an epic ten-minute rock crescendo that rises, falls and finally soars, reaching an orgasmic cloud of guitar arpeggios. Singer and guitarist Tom Verlaine squeals out a heavy dose of magical realism to match the theatricality of the first four songs. He mulls over a drug trip, "Broadway it looked so medieval/it seemed to flap like little pages/and I fell sideways laughing/with a friend from many stages" on "Venus" and tests the fragility of existence, "life in the hive puckered up at night/the kiss of death/the embrace of life/there I stand waiting 'neath the marquee moon/just waiting", on "Marquee Moon".
And then, it's spent. "Elevation" is a deflated counterpoint to "Marquee Moon". It comes on so sluggish and weak, it's hard to believe you're still even listening to the same Television album. "Guiding Light" drags things down even further, slopping in a piano to fill out the drudge of a mediocre ballad. "Prove It" is the only song of the last four that even comes close to sounding interesting, but even it's sprightly repetition wears thin after about a minute and a half. Finally, you have "Torn Curtain" which has one of the most annoying refrains that I've ever heard on a classic rock/classic punk/whatever album. When you hear the entire band sneering, "tears, tears, holding back the years" you'll know what I mean. They bring back the piano to reinforce the exhaustive guitar solos, trying their best to close out Marquee Moon in full poignancy, but it all just sounds lethargic and uninvolved.
It's funny, some might argue that, after the first four songs of Marquee Moon, the rest of the band's career was ALL post-sex exhaustion. I can't speak entirely well to that point, although I did find their sophomore album, Adventure, to be extremely dull. I do know, however, that Marquee Moon is too inconsistent to love and too interesting to ignore. The frustration from this duality has lead me to rarely listen to the album at all, yet I think I will always keep it around to remind myself good songs on subpar albums deserve as much affection as I can muster.
