The Velvet Underground
White Light/White Heat

THE REVIEW

After kicking out a German singer and an advertising professional of Polish origin from the group, the Velvet Underground enters the studio with a pissed-off mood and frazzled nerves. They crank up the amps to the max, volume melting, and start playing.

Who’s playing the bass? There’s no bass!

The sound engineers label the jam as supreme teenage garbage with frayed veins and neglect the entire production (some were getting it on with their girls on the mixer, others tending to their own business in the bathroom), and thanks to their negligence we now have this colossal ancestor (one of those with bristly fur and long tusks stuck in the ice) of lo-fi.

Primitive percussion serves as a grid for the sizzling viola, the puffing and clanking guitars, and the nervous and vibrant voice while the organ stretches out exhausted like a stream of acid over the boiling magma formed by the other instruments. The songs move from the amphetamine-driven (an adjective overused by reviewers trying to act cool, but here it should be taken literally) title track to the spoken word of "The Gift," where John Cale's voice recites a text of dark humor (a similar irony can be found in some story from Palahniuk's "Cavie") written by Lou Reed. "Lady Godiva’s Operation," recited by a Cale under an anesthesia-like state (Nick Drake must have taken note) talks about a sex change, and ends in an “anesthetic dizziness” with Reed coming out like a squawking parrot from Bahia seafront emphasizing his bandmate's words. The other two songs first serve to slow down, to change burnt-out amplifiers and to fiddle with the strings of the instruments ("Here She Comes Now") and then to pick up the pace again ("I Heard Her Call My Name"), and perhaps, to warn the listener. In essence, "I Heard Her Call My Name" should already indicate the group's potential danger, listen to the beginning, it reminds me of "Search and Destroy" (reminds me, because I heard the Stooges before the Velvet... you know, when you're a teenager at the start of the third millennium, to find good music, you go backwards, and then come back forward when you're ready for stuff like dEUS or Animal Collective, people you couldn’t appreciate knowing only their contemporary peers like Ligabue or Linkin Park)... if someone doesn’t sense it here, their danger I mean, then they have nothing left but to be engulfed by the fierce jaws of "Sister Ray." A song written on a train, which has the pace of a freight wagon on the tracks. The goods transported are speed, gays, and dead cops. I mean, they die along the way. Even here (here on the stain left on the carpet by a dead police officer) emerges a humor halfway between a Yiddish joke and theater of the absurd:

 “Oh no, you shouldn’t have done it! Don’t you know you’ll stain the carpet?!?!?

…and..by the way, got a dollar?”
“Oh no, don’t got the time… I’m too busy sucking my own dick.”

And I'm too busy listening to this rascal to pay attention to the old lady asking me to give up my seat on the bus.. so, it’s seven in the morning, I also have make-up classes to attend, this uproar in my ears... and you, old lady, can’t you snag another seat or just stand, which is so good for varicose veins? Because I can't hear you... I'm under where the drone slows down... I slink quietly into a smoking amp...

I recommend this album to anyone wanting to have fun at the cost of scorching their ears, to those craving to hear some good swirling music, a sonic mush in which the instruments are inextricable from one another. Not recommended for those who feel obligated to listen to it only because it’s the “second album by the Velvet Underground.” From the first squawk to the last hiss: this is a journey, not a holiday assignment.