I used to have such sweet dreams," sang Tom Verlaine with poisoned flippancy in "Careful," a song from the second and last Television album, Adventure. "Now it's more like an air raid."

Indeed, Verlaine has always written compositions about close emotional encounters of the phantasmagorial kind – of lovers and loners (Verlaine principal among them) populating a fourth dimension of cold, gray uncertainty–and then staged them like an air strike on the soul with sirenlike guitars, a banshee bass-and-drums barrage and his own wounded-coyote yowl. Dreamtime–only Verlaine's second solo LP since Television, one of the first-string CBGB bands, signed off in 1978 – finds the guitarist returning to fight another ten rounds with his fears. Or, as he says in "Fragile": "I've got to face what's never there."

Verlaine immediately takes the offensive in "There's a Reason," going after his "Cinderella with a new treat" to the martial beat of former Television bassist Fred Smith and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty (they split rhythm responsibilities here with Donald Nossov and Rich Teeter) until the chorus dissolves into a crystal rain of guitar notes. Dreamtime, in fact, is a veritable monsoon of guitar playing, from the resounding guitar choir (joined by Bruce Brody's church-bell piano) in the exhilarating "Always" to the awesome, acid-symphony finale of "Down on the Farm." In the gripping instrumental "The Blue Robe," Tom Verlaine applies free-jazz daring to exotic modal inventions in a manner reminiscent of the Quicksilver Messenger Service's John Cipollina or Roger McGuinn's twelve-string expansions in the Byrds' "Eight Miles High."

Though second guitarist Ritchie Fliegler's interlocking rhythms and fills recall Richard Lloyd's pivotal supporting role in Television, neither the brittle, post-Velvet Underground anxiety of Television's 1977 debut disc, Marquee Moon, nor the seductive chamber-music quality of 1979's Tom Verbaine match the dramatic resonance of Dreamtime's deep echo and rich, ambient production. Verlaine's volatile Ornette Coleman-cum-Keith Richards guitar orchestrations and dazzling sixstring maneuvers rarely threaten to overwhelm the songs. Instead, along with his strangely histrionic singing, they color in "what's never there," providing tangible presence to various phantoms.

Chords and arpeggios whip through "Without a Word" like wind in a deserted house. A chilling ballad of love given but not returned, "Without a Word" combines the romantic grandeur of Love's Forever Changes with the dark gentility of the late British songwriter Nick Drake. In "Penetration," the vicious pumping of Verlaine's guitars and Daugherty's drums accentuate the vivid sexual allusions and emotional push-pull between the tune's protagonists: "You say 'ok please get me what I need'/Well I'm sorry, I can't find it, please don't hate me." And the only things meaner than the singer's put-downs in "A Future in Noise" ("You're a graduate of the Reemco School of Numbness.../A new czar in the nothing regime") are his brief but searing guitar solos.

Like the French symbolist poet from whom he copped his professional surname, Tom Verlaine creates intensely moving pictures of that no man's land shared by the real and the unreal. Unlike the defeated woman in "Fragile" ("She said 'Oh no I guess it is my fate/To live a life I can't communicate/How painful ... painful ... but giving up is ok'"), he's seldom been at a loss for the right words or the most evocative sounds. And, in spite of the pain, he's never given up. Our dreams won't be quite the same. (RS 358)

DAVID FRICKE