The Velvet Underground
Velvet Underground And Nico

THE REVIEW

Wandering around a music store on a cold winter's day, nothing really caught my attention; new releases, old hits, compilations, none of these things particularly stimulated me. As I browsed through various CDs, I spotted one in the distance with a very strange cover—a big yellow banana on a white background!

Cute, I thought to myself, but what's the name of the band? Turning it over, I read... "The Velvet Underground and Nico"... interesting, '60s psychedelic rock... I'll take it! I head to the checkout, pay the handsome amount of 9 euros, and I stress 9 euros, and head home pleased with my good purchase, more fascinated by the cover and the price than by its content.
Inserting the CD into my stereo, I lie down on my bed completely in the dark, a procedure I often adopt for listening to new discs. It starts with the first song "Sunday Morning," wow, I say to myself, it's the one from the commercial. I revel in my bed listening to the sweet melodies of this piece, imagining myself on a white beach sipping a good drink, I start to dream; perhaps without knowing it, the true nymph of the album is enveloping me. "I'm Waiting for the Man" wakes me from Morpheus, the real track one of the Velvet's CD, Lou Reed's voice enters my room without knocking, the drum and guitar give an almost monotonous cadence to the piece, yet they lend a certain suggestive aura to it.

We move into the third track, a rarity in terms of beauty, the soul and body of the album. Sensual and dark is Nico's voice that takes center stage, a voice that cradles me in the darkness, leaving me eager to hear it again as soon as it finishes. The psychedelic-noir reaches its peak effect with "Venus In Furs," a measured march where Reed narrates a sick story of sex. Wonderful. The party livens up with the following "Run Run Run," a blues-rock gallop almost nonchalantly sung by the frontman. We return to the darkness with the funeral dance "ALL Tomorrow's Parties" and "Heroin," a true psychedelic manifesto, a song that starts calm, almost sunny, but as the minutes pass, becomes increasingly whirlwind, increasingly insistent, a descent into the inferno of drugs from which there is no return. The light becomes visible again with "There She Goes Again" and the sweet "I'll Be Your Mirror," a declaration of love from Reed to the beautiful Nico. The end of the album is acidic and hallucinatory, the noisy "The Black Angel's Death Song" and "European Son" where the distortions of the guitars reign supreme.

I wake up from my musical "journey" almost in a confused state, "The Velvet Underground and Nico," endorsed by the eccentric Andy Warhol, is something inexplicable in a few words, an album that amplifies the bond between music and art. Songs like pieces of a mosaic, a mosaic of life, a mosaic of an entire generation.