The Velvet Underground
White Light/White Heat

THE REVIEW

'White Light/White Heat' is dirty. It's hard. It's punk before punk, metal before metal, new wave before new wave. 'White Light/ White Heat' is drugs, dirt, disorder, confusion, oblivion. What more could a pure Rock listener want?

Without Nico and Warhol, in their original formation, the Velvet Underground finally had time to express in the best possible way their dark, experimental, crazy and perhaps a little bit rotten inside side.

And it is from this project that one of the most important albums for Rock as we understand it today was born. 'White Light/White Heat' is, if we want to make a comparison, the dirty and dark part of The Velvet Underground & Nico. From the title track, one can immediately grasp the project of Reed and his companions. Confused, distorted sound, feedback, sounds that seem to come directly from the electric outlet. However, the first track still contains the form of the traditional "song," Verse Chorus Verse, to be clear. It is with "The Gift," a superb free-form composition, accompanied by a tragic tale in pure underground style, that the Velvet begins to provoke, starting its crazy endeavor to definitively modify Rock. The sweet ballad "Lady Godiva's Operation," accompanied by a fantastic but almost imperceptible electric violin, is a hymn to prolixity, to repetition. What seem like guitars and drums are actually instruments for hypnosis overflowing with feedback. "Here She Comes Now" is a transition, the only song on the album to be truly pure melody, poetry. "I Heard Her Call My Name" follows the same zen concept as "Lady Godiva's Operation": hypnosis in a pre-punk key, this track refines and sharpens the concepts that in those years had come to form the "Hard" music.

But the revolution has just begun. "Sister Ray" is about to start. Written on a train after a terrible performance, "Sister Ray" is the most shocking track ever created by a musical group. Drugs, alcohol, sex, whores, blood, are encapsulated in 17 minutes of madness, 17 minutes of musical libido. A voice somehow trying to tell a story, screaming under that crazy guitar that does nothing but rave for the entire duration of the song. An orgy of noise where a drum beats the same constant rhythm throughout the track, never losing a second; a little organ improvises as the guitar's twin brother, generating a litany that lasts half the track, reaching its peak at minute 4:28. The rhythm then becomes increasingly bluesy, more relaxed, but maintaining that unmissable rhythm and tone. The end comes, after dozens of jolts and bounces, after those 17 minutes of anguished agony. Suddenly, like a heart attack, guitar, drums, organ stop playing.

After 'Velvet Underground & Nico' and 'White Light/White Heat', nothing will be the same in music, and after listening to them, everything in us will change.