So, by 1967, we’ve got some pop music to listen to. The album that ‘only sold 500 copies but everyone who bought it formed a band’. Bought in a little record shop which no longer exists in Margate, as another ‘what’s all the fuss about’ purchase, this influential album had completely passed me by during my teenage years.
The tinkling of the glockenspiel, and some gentle Lou Reed singing gently wakes us up on Sunday Morning, but the easy listening stops and the more familiar Reed vocal style kicks in on I’m Waiting For The Man. Next Nico’s husky, not quite in tune, Germanic vocal is introduced on Femme Fatale (Tracey Thorn does a fantastic cover on her first solo album), before John Cale’s screeching viola accompanies Reed through Venus In Furs. Run Run Run sounds like standard garage band fare, but the first half ends with the Nico classic All Tomorrow’s Parties.
The dark mood continues in the second half with Heroin, the subject matter made even more intense by Cale’s frantically shrieking viola. There She Goes Again rocks away a couple of minutes, as does Nico’s I’ll Be Your Mirror. The Black Angel’s Death Song pits Reed’s vocal against Cale’s viola in an almost Dylanesque number, before this album concludes with the group composition European Son, a ragged improvised thrash.
I wasn’t particularly excited at the thought of revisiting this album, but I’ve been surprised by how vibrant it still sounds. That’s what a great album does.
4* - a great album, still sounding fantastic after 55 years.
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