Adventure has never gotten the respect of Marque Moon. Perhaps its because it builds on the model of the first album and the songwriting is a bit more refined and polished. The British press have reassessed Adventure and decided it was superior album to the debut. They're very different albums but then again, who am I to argue with the Brits?

Verlaine's singing is more confident and less self-conscious and the playing show the band in synch. Lloyd and Verlaine's guitar interplay is every bit as inventive as the debut. Adventure is the result of a band playing together over a longer period of time and a songwriter finding the best voice for his band to express themselves.

Adventure is fleshed out with the title track, Ain't That Nothing (both the single and the rehearsal) and an early version of Glory. All these tracks (with the exception of the single version of Ain't That Nothing)are interesting to contrast with the more complete final versions. It's like watching a great master paint. While you get an idea of what the final painting will look like, you don't get the complete picture until the paint has finally dried.

Television's "Adventure" is an interesting and surprising second, and final effort. This album is prettier, and less confrontational than "Marquee Moon". That album screamed to be either loved or hated, but this cries for approval. Tom Verlaine keeps the songs a little shorter and even allows a co-write (guitarist Richard Lloyd on "Days"). Also, many of the jagged rhythmic figures and precisice syncopation is lost in favor of seventies rock approved power-chords, pentatonic rhythm guitar and country flourishes. This is, however, no standard rock record. It retains the arty compostition and interesting orchestration, but in a more mainstream context. "Glory" is upbeat, and strangly optimistic, while "Days" is a superb riffy ballad. "Foxhole" is a brillaint anti-war rant with a lively rock beat. "Careful" and "Ain't That Nothin'" are decent songs that are lessened in impact by their formulaic sound and standard choruses. "Carried Away" adds organ to the mix, and delivers an outstanding but creepy ballad that stays with you, and "That Fire" adds theremin and a slow groovy bassline to Television's guitar attack. The album closer "The Dream's Dream" has about six lines of almost non-sense lyrics, but is kept interesting through almost seven minutes with first rate, creepy, orchestration. This album, although more ornatly produced and upbeat than "Marquee Moon", posseses an understated quality and an innate sadness that hits after several listens. Overall, while not as great as "Marquee Moon", still deserves to be a classic, and worthy of purchase.

"Marquee Moon" is the 1977 classic debut that embodies the truism that an artist/band has a lifetime to produce the first work, and seven months to get going on the second. MM is visceral, part manifesto, part New York's best rock and roll band creating tension and release and poetic evocations of lyricist and Delaware native Tom Verlaine's adopted hometown (the dense music evokes those Mapplethorpe photos that adorn front cover and inner sleeve, yes, but also the shimmering NYCscape on the back of 1981's "Dreamtime", too - blacks and whites and greys, angles and shadows, dusted with silver, an impossibly bright toy night). "Adventure" - the title ALMOST feels ironic - perhaps intentionally aims for someting much different. This album is lyrically both more erotic, explicitly or implicitly preoccupied with relationships, and yet paradoxically less grounded - the imagery is often evocative of water, fire, air, gravity and the stuff of dreams ("Foxhole", one of only two guitar driven rockers, certainly stands out for its aggression, and its images of earth and flesh, war and sex). The lyrics are also full of frequently witty wordplay that's as earthy as much of the music is ethereal. And Allen Licht's notes notwithstanding, I can't see how anyone would find "Adventure" any more commercial than the debut. I'm happy the cover (it matters) is red (not early Stones/Patti Smith black and white) - even Richard Lloyd's jacket, zippered up (his gaze, which met the camara straight on in "Marquee's" Mapplethorpe portrait, is here averted, disappointingly - cast down), is of the same fire-engine red that frames the band photo. Funny, "Adventure" didn't "hit" me with the force of that astonishing debut back in the summer of 1978, and my response was hardly unique. Yet in this newly expanded edition, the second and final Television album (at least until fourteen years later, when the band's fine 1992 reunion album was issued by Capitol) is nearly as dazzling as the debut, notwithstanding various 'issues' that plagued the band during the period of its creation (and that contributed to its breakup)...Tom Verlaine obviously didn't want another New York Rock album to follow "Marquee Moon", however coiled and (in)tense - as he remarks in the liner notes, he was aiming for a less hurried pace, and says he envisioned various tracks and rhythms to sound "lumpy", as if the band were recording at some humid little studio down South in 110 degree weather, sweating and "sloppin'" through the material (I bet that's just what Green Day axed for when they cut their breakthrough, too!); and certainly the opening song, "Glory" captures this less urgent(indeed, "lumpy") feel nicely, until you fix on the hypnotic buzz just beneath the surface. Next up, "Days", with Lloyd's exquisite Byrdsian (5D) guitar and Verlaine's 'pastoral' lyrics, floats by like a dream. "Foxhole" explodes with energy: boldly sexy, funny, and somehow a gritty antiwar song bundled into one - the band rocks and the guitars sting and slash and caress, like "Elevation" one more once. "Careful" may suggest the Ramones' "I Don't Care" thematically, but the words are more nuanced, the music jauntier, more playful. Then the first of Verlaine's longer songs that indicate a greater interest in keyboards and creating textures and moods outside of the two guitar format, "Carried Away", a seductive beauty whose pianos and guitars chime and echo out of the speakers. "Carried Away", which closed the original album's first side, also features a brief watercolor organ solo. The meticulously crafted sound and relaxed rhythms evoke waves against rocks, and the lyrics' water imagery offer a suggestion that its narrator is letting go as "the old ropes grow slack." It's a lovely and slowly paced - yet compelling - piece you'll be carried away by. On the other side, "The Fire's" music is just as appropriate to its title, with "jacknkife" guitar slashing through a dramatic and unnerving narrative that achieves in a truly fresh and original manner what "Torn Curtain" from "Marquee Moon" couldn't, quite. "Ain't That Nothin'" is crunching Stones rock and roll with one of Lloyd's brilliantly planned and executed solos, and like many of "Adventure's" tracks it seems to fade too soon. The original album closed with a long, moody, exotic, dreamy track Verlaine had first titled "Cairo" (as imagined by one who'd never been there, certainly not in 1880), its slow buildup, single sung verse, keyboards, guitar effects, and watergongs closing the original proceedings with aural evocations of the unconcious, the ebb and flow of sleep and water and a Blakean/Paul Bowlesian lyric ("the dream dreams the dreamer...").... Slow fade to black, then - with this new expanded edition - we're back.

"Adventure", when first released, clocked in at under forty minutes, and just like the charged/electric/forward motion of MM, this mysterious and haunting work was over way too fast...An underrated followup to an epochal deput, it holds up better than some fans might have been expected a quarter century ago. Imperfect, sometimes eccentric, with the understated (even uninviting, at first listen) sound mix of a "Goats Head Soup", with hindsight it all seems quite deliberately paced, including the performances - yet these songs are of a piece (and the piece is "Adventure"). And the musicianship - Verlaine's guitars and keyboards creating a broader range of mood and effect, Lloyd's angry and incandescent axe mastery, Fred Smith's supportive, melodic, supple basslines and Billy Ficca's inventive and masterfully controlled drumming, are collectively, truly the work of a great band working together most of the time (you do sense even when Verlaine takes a left turn, we usually ends up somewhere strange and intoxicating as well). God I wish there were more Television records! Verlaine and Lloyd are together unstoppable, the pair creating a 'third mind' when working as one...Should you have "Adventure" already on vinyl, or the first edition CD, it's time to get it again, for now there's plenty more to entice and enlighten even if you 'know' the album intimately. First we get the title track that never was, "Adventure," a nearly six minute outtake that rocks like the Stones with John Lee Hooker when they performed "Boogie Chillen" together a few years ago; Lloyd emerging again as a brilliant rock 'n roller, and Verlaine pushing the band forward until the swing and raunch of the guitars is (at first, barely perceptably) displaced by a calming piano that takes over as lead instrument by song's end. Definitely a keeper, even if it didn't fit the mood of the original album. The single mix of "Ain't That Nothing" is next, and this mono mix is different, more dirty, dense and intense (maybe not better, but I love it) than the album take. An alternate "Glory" is somewhat longer than the officially released version, with more guitars (Lloyd's especially) and different lyrics - a nifty contrast to the album take. Finally, I only wish the dazzling, wild, pedal to the floor instrumental version of "Aint That Nothin'" that closes the set wasn't tape spliced (a la "Rice Pudding" or "I Want You (She's So Heave") after a mere ten minutes - a Stonesier, more linear "Johnny Jewel"? - well, maybe not, but another great, long Loyd/Verlaine/Television opus to add to the too slim catalog.

The package, which is a digipak that evokes and expands on the original LP cover, is gorgeous. Great photos too. Worth its weight in water, air, fire, gold, red, and black.

I like this more than Marque Moon b/c this is a bit more commercial and accessible. I love "Glory" which is their most mainstream song. I also enjoy "The Dream's Dream" which has gorgeous guitar solos throughout and a very dramatic closing solo.

I think "Marque Moon" is over rated and "Adventure" is hugely under rated

When this album came out in the late seventies the critics said it didn't hold a candle to their debut album Marquee Moon. Over time its reputation grew until it was finally recognised for what it is- a work of near brilliance. It doesn't have the hard edge of MM, but that is where its appeal lies- the hard edges have been smoothed out and replaced with a dreamy, surreal quality that acheives moments of greatness- check out "Carried Away", one of the few keyboard-based Television songs, and especially the final track "The Dream's Dream"- the interplay of guitar work between Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd has never been better than on this track. One of the best late seventies albums, no question.