Marquee Moon

Eight songs in about forty-six minutes, and the subtractive test finds little slack. Inside the songs almost nothing is idle: each guitar line is required by the other, and the riffs of See No Evil and Friction are built as interlocking parts that collapse if one is taken away. The title track’s length is compelled rather than permitted: its long instrumental passage climbs by stages to a climax and a return to the verse, and no stage could go without the climax losing its ground. See No Evil must open, the method stated at speed, and Torn Curtain is the compelled end, the record’s dread given room. The test bites lightly twice, and that holds the figure off the top: Guiding Light, a ballad, softens the second side without turning it, and Prove It restates the record’s manner more than it extends it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

What the record brings into the open is first a state: the city at night as a field of signs to be read, an expectancy half ecstasy and half dread, and a reach for elevation wanted and feared at once. Disclosure through sound is credited in full, and here the sound discloses more than a mood. Two guitars as equals in conversation, neither leading for long, show a way of making music together that is itself a social form, and the long climb of the title track discloses what anticipation is: how waiting builds, breaks and returns. The words come as images, oblique and exact (“the darkness doubled”, “lightning struck itself”), and suggest a meaning more than state one. Held below the bar because the condition uncovered lies nearer a mood than a meaning that can be stated and held, and the words reach a meaning only glancingly.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation is the record’s strongest quality, and it comes often. The title track is the summit: after the verses the guitars climb through a long solo, the drums gather, and the climb breaks into a cascade of bright figures that holds and then falls back to the verse, a transport as complete as any in its kind. Torn Curtain reaches a dark height, slow and heavy, dread made grand. Elevation and Venus lift in their choruses; See No Evil and Friction have a nervous, rising drive; Guiding Light reaches a fragile, tender height. Prove It stays nearer level. The heights are of two kinds, the bright climb and the slow dread, and they come on six or seven of eight songs. What holds the figure below the top is the voice, which strains where the guitars soar, and the sameness of the instrumentation, which gives the heights one colour.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Myth is evoked often and built hardly at all, and the evocation is consistent. The titles and images summon old figures: Venus met as the armless statue (“Venus de Milo”); the moon over a marquee, the night city’s own light; a car leaving a graveyard in the title song, death and return glimpsed as a scene; Torn Curtain, the title of a film that also carries the rent veil of the temple; the detective of Prove It, the investigator of the city at night. Beneath them runs one pattern, the night journey toward a revelation that never quite arrives, and the title track enacts it in sound, climbing, breaking and coming back. Held well below the bar because the figures are glimpsed, not carried: no person bears the pattern, nothing would fall if it were taken away, and the particular is withheld as much as the archetype.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is the Velvet Underground and the garage rock of the 1960s, the New York club scene of 1974 to 1976 at CBGB, and behind them the long improvisations of the West Coast bands and the modal jazz Tom Verlaine admired. The turn is large. In a scene that had made the short song and the refusal of the solo its creed, the band built long songs around composed and improvised guitar lines, and did it without the blues vocabulary every rock guitar solo had used: clean, angular, interlocking lines that sound like neither punk nor the jam bands. The stake was real, the band’s place in its own scene and its commercial life, and the record sold modestly. Held from the top by precedent: the Velvet Underground’s guitar interplay and the San Francisco bands had opened the path, and the jazz model was proven.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the record loses what it knows, because its knowledge is the interplay. Each guitar part is incomplete without the other, and the song exists only in their meeting: Venus and See No Evil are built from parts that answer each other, not from a lead over a rhythm. The title track’s form is its meaning: verse and chorus, then a long passage that climbs through stages to a climax, and then the verse again, so that the song knows what it is to wait, to break and to return. The sequence is counted here, once: the first side rises from the nervous songs to the title track’s ten minutes, and the second runs from Elevation to the slow dread of Torn Curtain. Held from the top because Prove It and Guiding Light use a familiar verse and chorus as a container for the guitars rather than as a form that knows.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence over forty-nine years, and most of it formal. The record is still transcribed and studied by guitarists for its parts, and its interplay separates further on each hearing: which guitar plays which line, where the two cross, how the drums push the climb. The title track, faded early on the first issue and later given at full length, has let listeners hear the climb’s end as played. The words, oblique and imagistic, invite return and give some. Held from the top because the depth is of sound more than of sense: the formal depth is demonstrated and the semantic depth only suggested, part of what is found in the words is projection invited by obscurity, and the record has had fewer decades of argument than the most discussed records of its time, its return concentrated among musicians and critics.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is the rock album of the later 1970s, punk and the music that followed it. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of the instrument’s grammar: the record showed that rock guitar could leave the blues behind without leaving rock, and that two guitars could play as equals in composed counterpoint rather than as lead and rhythm. The reach was slow and lay among musicians, the public reach was small, and much of the influence travels as a general idea of clean, interlocking guitars rather than as the record’s own method; delayed reach is credited at a discount, and that keeps the figure near the bar. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is commonly credited with shaping the guitar playing of post-punk and of the alternative and indie rock that followed, and later bands from the 1980s to the 2000s name it among their models.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-nine years. The form is whole: the album survives as issued and in print, with the full-length title track available beside it. Presence is continuous but charged: the record is heard whole and placed high whenever its decade is counted, but it was little played on radio in its time and is little known beyond musicians, critics and devoted listeners, and no song from it has entered common circulation. The fabric carries little date: clean guitars and a dry room, with nothing tied to a studio fashion, though the thin, dry sound is heard by some as of its year. The span and the fabric would carry the figure higher; the narrow presence is charged against them, and the figure stands where that charge sets it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing in the guitars. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd play parts that are exact and composed to interlock, and solos that are built rather than run: Lloyd’s compact and melodic, Verlaine’s long and climbing, the title track’s climb placed stage by stage. Billy Ficca drums with a jazz looseness that pushes the climbs; Fred Smith’s bass holds the ground plainly. Andy Johns’s production keeps each guitar separate and clear across the stereo field, which the interplay requires. The faults are real and fall on a share of the record: Verlaine’s voice is thin and strained, and it carries every song; the sound is dry and light in the low end, which serves the guitars and starves the whole; the bass and some arrangements are plain. A command of the highest order in one element, strong elsewhere, weak in the voice.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law governs the record: two guitars in conversation over a steady ground, reaching toward an elevation that is wanted and feared, in a city at night. The two most distant elements obey it. See No Evil, under four minutes of nervous drive, and Torn Curtain, seven minutes of slow, heavy dread, are the same interplay at opposite speeds and temperatures, one reaching up and one weighed down. Guiding Light, the tenderest song, keeps the interlocking parts and the night, and Prove It’s detective and Venus’s statue are images from the same city. Nothing breaks the law. Held from the top by range: the instrumentation is one throughout, the voice one, the register largely nocturnal, and narrowness is not coherence. The law, never broken, is tested over a modest field.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as expectancy, nerves and dread. The city is held as night, light and signs. Love is glimpsed in Venus and Guiding Light; death in the graveyard of the title song and in Torn Curtain; the sacred in Elevation and the rent veil, glimpsed more than held. The detective of Prove It brings the city’s crime and law into view as a figure, and the band’s interplay holds one social form, two players as equals. What holds the figure lowest on the page is how few orders there are and how lightly most are held: labour, the family, the state, history and the natural order beyond the night sky are absent, and one consciousness in one city at night joins the rest. The figure describes the record’s chosen narrowness.

Score: 6.8 / 10