Having Tom Verlaine be your very specific hero is a very specific kind of artistic sentence, and Lawrence Hayward has lived and died under that spell for most of his career. This is hardly a dismissal—you could do better with most Felt records if it was between them and solo Verlaine albums. Felt was supposed to last only ten years, and this album came towards the end of that run, in 1986. Keyboardist Martin Duffy, later of Primal Scream, adds some of the best non-R&B Hammond organ playing I’ve ever heard. The overall production has the same glassy feel of Go-Betweens albums from the same year. Hayward really did find the sense of language that suits a son of Reed and Verlaine. In “Down But Not Yet Out,” he rips one of those double take poetic jam-ups that the New York boys love: “I was sailing the stars of secrecy, and I was wearing the mask of honesty.” Were you! His rep as a recluse and his taste in esoteric covert art made Felt records seem much stranger than they really were. He’s very good at making rock records, and people overdosed on The Smiths and Prefab Sprout should come over to the Felt side. “All the people I like are those that are dead,” Lawrence sings. That leaves a lot of options!

Felt’s sixth album was in many ways seemingly atypical to what had preceded it – all its songs had vocals from Lawrence while Martin Duffy, himself the subject of the cover art, had as much presence with his organ and keyboards as did Lawrence’s typically elegant guitar playing. But as a result Forever Breathes The Lonely Word was perhaps Felt’s high point at capturing a psych pop Velvet Underground feeling for an 80s audience, with songs like “All The People That I Like Are Those That Are Dead” and “Rain of Crystal Spires” sparkling with mood and energy.