Customer Reviews

Flash Light

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I love this record. I like Television but I really think Tom Verlaine's solo output is scandalously under-rated. When this was released in the mid-80's the music scene was a tad dull with little for anyone who needed challenging to get their ears round.

'Flashlight' has it all. Tracks such as 'A Town called Walker' and 'Cry Mercy, Judge' are true rockers with the wit and paranoia you expect from Verlaine. 'The Scientist writes a letter' is a different fish altogether; a study of the end of an affair wrapped into an innocuous sounding letter with a strange atmosphere. Excellent.

The second side (as was) starts with the core track 'Bomb' where the usual pop/rock notion of 'we can work it out, baby' gets inverted into a black hole of hopelessness, as the writer realises there really is no way back into the relationship. A warped and acid display.

The other tracks are also very good. I'm not going to analyse them all here but if you like food for thought with your rock tinged with psychedelia and guitar work as taut as cheese wire, then buy this CD!

Rate it 10 stars! I missed this one in 1987, and finding it now is truly a gift. Tom Verlaine has never been stronger vocally, lyrically or instrumentally, with superb backup by Fred Smith, Jimmy Ripp and Allen Schwartzberg. On first playing, the songs synched right into the grooves worn into my brain by repeated listening to TV's Marquee Moon when it first came out, and pushed me right over the edge into euphoria. Listen to any one of the cuts, and see if it doesn't send you there, too. Try "Cry Mercy, Judge," and if that doesn't quite do it for you, move on to "ATown Called Walker," "At 4 A.M.,' or "Annie's Tellin' Me." Dancing on the edge of perfection...guess the friends who worry about me when I tell them Tom's lyrics make perfect sense to me can start worrying again! Don't miss this album--one hearing and you'll be "falling in love again...can't help it."

It was a shock for me when this album disappeared, unheralded. The writing is great, with an informal jokiness you never found in that decade. The guitar is simply fantastic - original, with great whammy-bar shimmers and beautiful solos. And the lyrics are deep and touching. The snare drum is typical '80s (sounds like small arms fire) but overall this album had soul in a very chilly era, sonically speaking. This is also a perfect example of an album that has great variety without sounding like a mish mash. A countrified tune, a U2-ish song, a dance-y track, man this one has it all. If you like intelligent writing you'll love this album, and for once the musicianship is there too! Run - don't walk! - to get this disc.

"Song" is the real masterpiece here... a tender love song that is utterly devoid of cliche on every level (some of the template for _The Bends_-era Radiohead comes from here I think). Genius. "The scientist writes a letter" is almost as good... a gorgeously cinematic song. The rest of the record isn't quite up to those two songs' exalted standards but almost all of it (skip "Cry mercy, judge") is still pretty darned good. Tom Verlaine's voice remains a fragile instrument (and it sounds horrible in the streaming audio clips that amazon provides!) and an acquired taste... but it's well recorded on _Flashlight_ and the overall warmth of the record makes _Flashlight_ a good entry point into solo Verlaine.

Tom Verlaine is justly celebrated and regarded as one of rock's best and most innovative guitarists who has a gift for improvised guitar solos and interplay with other like-minded guitarists, best demonstrated by his work in the seminal NYC band Television with Richard Lloyd. His solo albums and songs are much less consistent, but also show his talents in spots. At the same time, Verlaine's songs are often idiosyncratic, whimsical, inscrutable, and almost determinedly anti-commercial, much like his interviews and persona, severely limiting his audience and sales of his recordings and concert tickets and have restricted Verlaine to fringe/cult artist status. "Flash Light", first released in 1987, represented a significant change in his songcraft and album production. Almost all of its songs were melodic and energetic with some actual hooks and beats and relatively effervescent; the abstract quotient was also markedly reduced, although not eliminated, and over half of the tracks would not have been out of place on pop-rock radio. Some songs, notably "The Scientist Writes A Letter", "A Town Called Walker", "Song", and "At 4 A.M.", have lyrics that communicate directly to the listener with intelligence and emotional resonance. Verlaine's renowned electric guitar playing fortunately did not suffer, and all of the songs on "Flash Light" featured innovative, intelligent, energetic guitar work that compares favorably to his playing on Television's seminal albums and his solo recordings. The guitar playing is not superficial flash or shredding, though, like the playing of many better-known guitar virtuosos, but services the songs well. The emphasis on good songcraft combined with Verlaine's uniquely excellent guitar work resulted in an album of music that's both aurally attractive and intelligently rewarding to listen to. Its listenability does not detract from its intelligence and innovation, and the album is both immediately enticing like top-40 pop songs and intelligently innovative, and rewards repeated listens. However, for reasons unclear to me and despite being issued by I.R.S. Records, a relatively artist-friendly label that was also effective at record and artist promotion, "Flash Light" continued the Verlaine pattern of minimal sales and notice, and soon went out of print, with I.R.S. dropping Verlaine.

[Media profiles of Verlaine and interviews with bandmates, ex-managers, record company executives, and others who have worked with Verlaine indicate he has varying degrees of being difficult to work with and a lackadaisical, even self-destructive attitude towards his recording and concert career, which may have contributed to the commercial failure of "Flash Light" and perhaps I.R.S. electing to drop Verlaine after only 1 album instead of trying to develop him over 2-3 albums.]

I stumbled on a used I.R.S. cassette of "Flash Light" in late 1993 and, despite its low-fidelity and worn tape, it immediately engaged me and I played it incessantly in my car. I searched hard but fruitlessly for a used or new CD copy; I even began to doubt the CD actually existed despite media evidence to the contrary. I was happy to find a near-mint vinyl copy of "Flash Light" in 1994 (along with a pristine copy of the Records' debut album [featuring "Starry Eyes"] that featured the 4-track 45-rpm EP of covers) in a San Antonio record store and promptly made a high-quality cassette recording of it that I played repeatedly in both my car and at home. In 1998, I found a Fontana CD import of "Flash Light" that I purchased despite its $20 price. Although not directly useful to me, I am elated that Collectors' Choice Music (CCM) reissued "Flash Light" on CD in 2006, along with Verlaine's eponymously-titled solo debut, which is almost as good as "Flash Light"; I only wish they had reissued it before I bought the import CD, as the list price is very reasonable at $12-13. I bought it anyway as a magazine suggested Verlaine wrote liner notes for the CCM reissue, and was mildly disappointed that the CCM reissue featured no liner notes or additional recording information. For such a momentous reissue, I believe CCM should have featured thoughtful liner notes from Verlaine or a Television bandmate (Richard Lloyd would have been ideal) and bonus tracks from the "Flash Light" recording sessions (the "Cry Mercy Judge" single featured non-album b-sides and I suspect other "Flash Light" tracks exist, including alternate versions of its songs). However, even this bare-bones reissue should be purchased by anyone who likes intelligent, innovative, guitar-driven pop-rock.

Tom Verlaine is a MASTER guitarist, songwriter & singer. He is beyond PUNK. He is in complete control of his spirit on FLASH LIGHT as with any of his earlier LP releases. Shimmering git lines along with beautiful vocal melodies tie these songs together. Check out: "A Town Called Walker", "The Scientist Writes A Letter" or "One Time At Sundown" for proven facts. This guy had & still had it together on this release. A must for any TV fan or any guitar lover.

this is a record that is unfortunately marred by 80s production aesthetics. Overcompressed drum sounds, tons and tons of reverb. The things you really want to hear on a Tom Verlaine album -- his voice and his guitar arrangements -- are sopping wet and buried in the mix.

I'd rather just hear him dry. If Marquee Moon remains the record against which his other records tend to be judged, it's in part because the production on that record was so well suited to the music -- punchy, relatively dry, transparent. while Verlaine's voice is wobbly and eccentric, efforts to tart it up with gallons or reverb or efforts to conceal it by burying it in the mix only result in vaguery where there should be a focal point.

Furthermore, Marquee Moon's material was well developed - every song had lots of structure -- intros, bridges, stops and starts, build ups, outros, hooks etc. Flashlight, like many of the solo albums, features songs that could easily have been Television songs, and deliver similar pleasures in flickering, tantalizing bits, but they aren't developed, tend to be a bit homogenous from start to finish.