There is a lot of talk (I have done some of it myself) about the idea of the "difficult" third album. You throw everything you have into your first album; everything else goes into the second. By then you become identified, most likely, as having a definable "sound". You have run out of songs. You might feel trapped in your perceived "identity". What do you do? You might do more of the same, and get canned. (The Ramones, you might say, did this ad infinitum.) You might crash through the walls of the box in which you have found yourself, successfully ("London Calling", "The Correct Use of Soap") or not (Franz Ferdinand, or not, depending on who you are reading, and I haven't heard either of their second or third albums and don't really care either way).
But what about the difficult second album? The story here is that you have five years in which to make your first album and six months to make your second. (This is no longer true; the modern dynamic, if anything, is more like you have six months to make your first album and a couple of years to make your second.) How your second album lasts, in the long term, really depends on where your career goes from there. To use the first two examples above, "London Calling" followed the disappointment of "Give 'Em Enough Rope", which remains more or less lost between the twin towers of the self-titled first album and "London Calling". Contrast with Gang of Four, whose first album was an inspiration, for me at least, whereas I don't know anyone who would cross the room to listen to "Solid Gold", largely, I suspect, because their career then went nowhere, or nowhere interesting, so there isn't much of a gap to fill.
In the case of Magazine, and I would throw in with them also Echo & The Bunnymen, their first albums were such a blast that for each of them the follow-up had to be a disappointment. And, for me, both were. But they sit so centrally inside a solid body of work (the former, for me, more so than the latter) that they remain intriguing, and I keep coming back to them from time to time, looking for the secret key with which to unlock their mysteries.
Which brings me, longwindedly and largely irrelevantly, to "Adventure", the second, and final (for so many years, anyway, that the much later self-titled third album forms its own continuum), album by Television. It, too, suffered under the oppressive weight of what came before. Television's first album, "Marquee Moon", is regarded, by me and by many other people, including many Actual Serious Music Critics, as one of the finest rock records ever made. Its title track is simply untouchable. Television had been around a long time, were roughly contemporaneous with, but were singularly not, punk. They looked cool. They hung with Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. They had to release a second album, and it fell flat. It is difficult to know what happened. All the ingredients are there. Maybe if it had been released by anybody else it would have been hailed. But it was by Television, and as such it had to be compared with its predecessor. And in every respect it fell short, and I have recently established that such is still the case 31 years later. The red colour scheme isn't quite as good as the black (although the red vinyl out of which my copy is made is rather sharp). The Mapplethorpe photo is not quite as talismanic as the one on "Marquee Moon". The songs, in favouring simplicity over the former's complexity, come across as not quite as good. The intertwined guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, likewise, are not quite as good. Heck, even its "Marquee Moon" ("Ain't That Nothin'") is no "Marquee Moon".
Thus, it is a record that will always live in the shadow of its big brother. Nevertheless, I am happy to have found a used copy of the CD reissue, because "Marquee Moon" and "Adventure" deserve to sit together on any self-respecting record shelf, as they have done for many years at our house, down where the vinyl goes. It just won't get pulled out as often.
