TV21 - A Thin Red Line
#563
November 1981 LISTENING POST DISCOVERY
TV21
A Thin Red Line
Genre: Should be a New Wave classic
4.75 out of 5
Highlights:
Waiting for the Drop
Ideal Way of Life
Ticking Away
It Feels Like It’s Starting to Rain
What’s Going On?
Something’s Wrong
Tomorrow…
I am not going to relay the frustrating history of this band’s near success. Instead, I will link to an article that outlines.
But, from the very first track “Waiting for the Drop”, you know that this is a group that was on to something. That something being the burbling sound of epic New Wave. They should have toured with the likes of Echo & the Bunneymen and others and seemed to have been on that path. That no one has ever heard of this band or this record is a sad travesty of rock history.
I sure had no idea who they were until this album was unearthed.
Elegiac, at times even majestic, TV21 took what they learned listening to Joy Division and amped it up, added other instruments and came up with something that, dammit, we should be talking about in the conversations of influential music of the 80s.
It’s no surprise that Ian Broudie produced this. It’s easily on par with Crocodiles or Porcupine or Original Mirrors.
While “Snakes and Ladders” is the song the band thought should be the single, I gravitate more to the lushly weird “What’s Going On?” And the almost melancholic “It Feels Like Its Starting to Rain” and the as-good-if-not-better-than-U2 “Something’s Wrong”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi9Tj44aE5k&list=PLvhtFJLy0g8vtfscJ-2RSg_fjdb93YPHg
https://excavatingthe80s.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/tv21/
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