Dan Treacy has been claiming that Television Personalities are over and done with, and that he's quitting music. Maybe he'll be back and maybe he won't: His band's first kiss-off was They Could Have Been Bigger Than the Beatles, back in 1982, and they recorded one of the greatest goodbye-to-all-that albums ever, Closer to God, a decade after that. MGMT's "Song for Dan Treacy" was a conceptual variation on Treacy's own "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives", an encomium to a hero who's still alive but lost. Somehow, though, the TVPs keep turning up to get the final word in.
Treacy's persona has always been a sort of tormented dandy-- a frail, high-aesthetic gentleman who's been screwed by coming from the wrong end of the British class system, filtering his fury through Pop Art and pop songs-- and he's never been shy about showing his scars. But after all the drugs and the professional struggles and the jail time, he seems somewhat impaired as a songwriter and performer. He's definitely not gone, like latter-day Brian Wilson or Syd Barrett, and a good deal of his old sharp-toothed wit is intact, but not all of it. He sounds not just scarred but damaged. So A Memory Is Better Than Nothing is an album about hurting so badly that it's no longer possible to express the pain clearly, which makes it tough to listen to but also tough to dismiss.
The band isn't just Treacy, fortunately; he's got a backup team to flesh out his sketches, and most of these songs have nicely realized arrangements propping up his wobbly voice, more or less in the mode of the first few Television Personalities albums. "All the Things You Are" is the sort of crushed-hearted throwaway he could have pulled off at any time in his career; when he gets to the big chorus of "She's My Yoko", it sounds like he's making a Herculean effort to pull himself together, but he does make it.
A couple of songs make good use of Johanna Lundström's voice, which is fragile in a very different way--the skeletal version of "The Good Anarchist" that appeared on a single a couple of years back was sung by Lundström without Treacy, in fact. (He adds a verse to this take, which ends with the kind of sped-up elfin voices he used on "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives" decades ago.) When the album's bad, though, it's wretched: the five minutes of aimless jamming at the end of "My New Tattoo", the doomed come-on of "Come Back to Bed", the limp "See Emily Play"-isms of "Except For Jennifer", the way "If You Don't Want Me" tries and fails to build a song out of a single half-baked idea. Too often, A Memory depends on its listeners' own memories of Television Personalities' fuming force to contextualize a band mustering up the few resources that remain to them.
