The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground & Nico

THE REVIEW

This album is stunning, chiaroscuro and sadistic like few others. It is an album of pure plastic. Plastic because it is produced in an antiseptic, gray society; plastic because it is the debut work of a non-passionate genre, but murderous, cold as plastic. The music is dark, sometimes annoying and nightmarish. However, it allows itself some purely melodic and absolutely exquisite breaks.

Let's start with this minority; the introductory “Sunday Morning” is melodious polystyrene. It is a perverse music box that delights in deceiving us. It is a very sweet candy with poison inside. It's like covering a deep and infected cut with a bow. I find it fantastic, almost masochistic in its beauty. Already from here, one can sense that this album is pure excess, pure exaggeration; nothing holds back from being normal, everything is pushed to the maximum of its psychic and auditory power. Another melodic gem is “Femme Fatale”. Embroidered on a soft but at the same time cold fabric, it features Nico as the protagonist, in a sweet and sincere performance. Seemingly happy backing vocals accompany the chorus. That sensation of tar-covered romanticism that this track transmits to me is inexplicable, truly immense.
“I’ll Be Your Mirror” is the least subject to plastic and chemical contamination, it's the most classic and simple track of the album, the most natural. Pure sweetness, without the chance of reply from the group's sharp instruments. In between the first two pieces is “I’m Waiting For The Man”, a track I would dare call inertial, following a steady drumbeat interwoven with acidic and sweet sounds. The music here is not plastic, but iron, rusty iron that continuously scrapes against a rough surface. Reed doesn't seem to sing; he speaks in a very rhythmic and agitated way, with his brutal and no-frills voice, lashing. It's one of the group's most famous pieces.
“Venus In Furs”, a track with clearly sexual lyrics, is already pure desert. The electric viola sketches desolate landscapes with its funereal, oriental, desperate, and dark progression, like a sick dog. Then Reed thinks of building on this arid view his funeral chant, exciting and also liberating in airy bursts. It is a masterpiece, so beautiful and intense that it goes beyond mere auditory perception; this is a dark, perverse pleasure. It calls hidden senses from the depths, liberates them. Yes, it is liberating. In its oppressing, it gives vent to hidden desires and needs. I regard it as pure poetry of the 20th century.
“Run Run Run” is a more conventional piece, in the sense that it doesn't overthrow you like the previous one but is an excellent Rock n’ Roll track. The viola continuously embroiders over the bass and drum base. The eccentric and sick solo in the middle digs circular, spiral furrows, nails, restarts piercingly until it dissolves on itself and slowly disappears. The vocal part is excellent too; it feels distant, like singing in the city's fog, with notes dispersing among smoke and shadows. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is like an anthem. The music here becomes less acidic and more enveloping, less suffocating and more dark, leaving us with Nico's melody, so undulating and uncertain, so precarious and steady…

“Heroin” is a drug. Not a song, but a journey made intravenously into the mind and muscles of a man who takes drugs, any man. The music is actually the heartbeat, and the words are nothing but the unconscious of that man. Reed and company have no shame. They also allow themselves to mock us, making us suffer, and they gently attack with slow beats and sweet notes. Beats that increase simultaneously with words that ignite, confess, and attempt a little to justify themselves, a little to revel in the harm. The viola notes are even joyful, it is a harsh contrast, inconceivable, a product of the rooted sadism in the musicians and thus in the music. The song continues like this until the word “heroin” is pronounced, said so slowly and with such relish that it gives you chills... The track rises in tone, gets lost in itself and in its distortions, in its frantic beats until it becomes like a blade which, however, immediately shatters and ends in nothingness… only the beats and sweet notes remain to make us seem as if nothing happened. A bit like the drug, it deluded us, played with us, and then denied everything…
Of lower significant level is “There She Goes Again”, also because after such a track it would be difficult to do better. However, it remains a beautiful semi-carefree song, it seems like a parody of the sixties beat. The musical line varies between fluid parts and rhythmic blocks; the contrast of the backing vocals with the often cold music is suggestive. Like trying to make a beach umbrella from concrete.
“The Black Angel’s Death Song” begins like a swarm attacking you; the music continually rises and falls, pressure builds, you lose your points of reference, you start to see everything blurred. It isn’t a sung track, it’s more of an invocation, a jagged speech interrupted by that sound of red-hot iron immersed in water. It’s a febrile track, it sincerely annoys. It’s clear that it wasn’t created as a track, but rather an anguished composition accompanied by the most revolting and repugnant, metropolitan, and raw music there is. It circles around you continuously, then stops, but you are so hypnotized that you keep spinning, absorbed by the sound, and when the music box turns off, you notice your stupidity, weakness, and senselessness. The music of Velvet Underground is like a big sadistic smile that mocks you for all this, delights in seeing you terrified and even tries to deliver the coup de grâce.

The album ends with “European Sun”, another ill-fated journey through human garbage and sadism. It starts cheerful, certainly with that cursed vein that distinguishes the group. Then a window shatters, there’s commotion, and the track starts running on spiny, shaky rails. This journey seems to have no return to hearing the distorted, confused, cursed cries. It proceeds rapidly, doesn’t look back, isn’t afraid of what it will encounter. It is a radical, noise-filled track, disheartening to exhaustion; there are moments when you beg for mercy, kneel, and ask for forgiveness, hoping this devilish punishment ends as soon as possible. Strident to the absurd, without head or tail, it's practically a nightmare…

It’s difficult to make general comments about the album because, given its richness and complexity, something would inevitably be left out. Only the eleven songs it comprises remain, sometimes bleak, sometimes seemingly sweet, but so sincere that they end up becoming the manifesto of an era, of a way of life, and ultimately, of a state of mind… I believe it is the best album ever made, certainly dependent on tastes, but it still remains among the most expressive, raw, and lucid musical works of the last century…