Television's second album Adventure, released in 1978, is generally unfairly maligned. And why? For one reason alone. It was the follow up to their debut Marquee Moon, a pretty much flawless record, in fact one of the best Rock and Roll records ever made. It's fixed status in the top rungs of Greatest Album Ever lists attests to that. Adventure almost inevitably pales by comparison. But it's still a mighty fine record.
The band's star was probably on the wane by the time they came to record Adventure. Despite the almost universal critical acclaim Marquee Moon was greeted with, it didn't sell, save for making a dent in the lower reaches of the UK album chart. Tom Verlaine's increasingly authoritarian instincts were diluting the weedy arty gang mystique of the band and Verlaine's foil Richard Lloyd was beginning to wilt after years of drug and alcohol dependency.
Still, there's much to admire here. In many ways Adventure comes across as the day following Marquee's Moon's night. Opener Glory comes tearing out of the traps, another instant twin guitar classic. Days meanwhile is one of the band's finest songs. Almost a template for The Go Betweens who were surely taking notes in Brisbane.
In many respects the songs on the second album could be matched with equivalents on Marquee Moon. Glory is See No Evil, Days is Venus, and both songs stand up fine although there would have been no sense of shock of the new to those who waited in fevered anticipation for the second record following the massive impact Moon had on critics and discerning fans in '77.
However it's at this point that things begin to go awry. Foxhole is wired and frenzied in the same way as Friction had been but while Friction was magisterial and utterly taut, Foxhole is shrill and grating. It's frankly almost impossible to listen to. A band that never had to try are suddenly trying too hard. After Careful, which is slight and poppy in the way Prove It had played a similar trick the year before Side One ends and Side 2 commences with a pair of similar drawn out pieces of atmospherics in Carried Away and The Fire. Likeable enough but hardly enough to set the hairs on the back of your neck a bristle as every single song on the band's debut had done. Television's moment, it seemed had come and gone.
Still, the band had two more cards to play before letting the curtain drop on one of the most intriguing careers in Rock history. Penultimate track Ain't That Nothing is a final reminder of the band's astonishing guitar interplay pyrotechnics. At their peak they gave The Stones a run for their money. It's just phenomenal from start to finish.
And then there's A Dream's Dream which always strikes me as one of the saddest yet most elegant codas to any recording career. With barely a verse of words before subsiding into trademark guitar duelling which brinks the seven minute mark. It has a quite pristine beauty to it that anybody who ever loved the sound of electric guitars is sure to thrill to.
A few months later, after touring the record, the band split. So, Adventure. It's no Marquee Moon, that's for sure. There's a lethargy to it of a band who sense the sands in their timeglass are almost spent. A band that have lost their anger and hunger, their tension and some of their mystery too. Still I'm very grateful for five of its eight songs, and I still play it all the time. For all it's sadness and sense of opportunity lost it has to be admitted that their debut was never something that was ever going to be topped. Some mountains are only meant to be scaled once. Adventure marks a much lower peak in the same range, but there's are still some seriously beautiful views to be had.
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