| It’s just fabulous from beginning to end. The cocky art-school posing of the mainly-spoken vocals don’t seem pretentious because the genuine intelligence that drives them is so cracklingly present at all times; the guitars are reaching for new sounds and unheard chords as if something might someday depend on their having succeeded; the band’s understanding of terms like “rave-up” and “jam” are lucidly and radically different from any other ideas of the term in use then or in any time since. They owe a fair debt to the Velvet Underground, of course -- who doesn’t? -- and similarities to Television are too consistent to be accidental. But Television had pop currents crossing through their French symbolist streams of consciousness, while MX-80 Sound had all their weapons at the ready and their eyes directly on the art gallery. |