Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip | Music for Experimental Film DVD
True West | Hollywood Holiday Revisited
Various Artists | Boston Underground 1979–1982
ROLL BACK | Review by Peter Aaron
Tom Verlaine may not be as famous (or wealthy) as Eric Clapton, but
to more progressive guitar heads there’s only one true God—and his initials are T.V. In the mid 1970s Verlaine and his band Television famously initiated the CBGB scene that kicked off the punk explosion in New York. But the pioneering quartet also managed to remain separate from the ensuing rabble, thanks mainly to its members’ superior musicianship and higher artistic aspirations. Verlaine’s dueling partner in Television was the great Richard Lloyd, but, along with a fruitful solo career, he’s since found a new guitar foil in producer/session player Jimmy Rip. On the DVD Music for Experimental Film, the pair lays down spontaneously incidental soundtracks to seven silent avant–garde shorts from the 1920s. As the ghostly and surreal images created by Fernand Leger, Hans Richter, Man Ray, and others dance and dissolve across the screen, Verlaine and Rip’s
edgy and quixotic flights offer the perfect, dreamlike accompaniment.
Hypnotic and great. Continue... |
