The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat
1968
I don't remember where I read this, but some clever reviewer called VU&Nico their heroin album, and this their amphetamine album. The album sure as hell kicks off with a blast. “White Light/White Heat” is explosive, with bass that sounds like it's trying to tear through your speakers, piano playing that sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis on PCP, and ominous background noise that builds until the whole song devolves into a mass of noise. The song could have been recorded yesterday and it would sound just as intense, the fact that it was recorded in 1968 is just mind-blowing. This whole album is the sound of a band tearing itself apart, of carefully concentrated nihilism.
“The Gift” is wonderful, though it's really a song that loses its appeal after a few listens. The first couple times are the only ones that really matter though. The story told is dark, absurd, and clever, and is backed up by an extremely driving and repetitive rhythm with loose guitar improvisation pasted on top. It's basically Beckett told to kraut-rock. Before there was a such thing as kraut-rock, of course.
“Lady Godiva's Operation” begins as a dream and turns into a nightmare. To begin, delicate bass and guitar melodies float on top of a flowing sea of drone. The beauty quickly becomes dark and sinister however, and Cale's dreamy vocals are continuously interrupted by Reed's amelodic outbursts, and the song ends with our protagonist, Lady Godiva, dying from a botched lobotomy.
“Here She Comes Now” is a return to the general style of VU&Nico, and despite being tender and beautiful, is probably the least interesting song on the album. A good way to end the physical and mental assault of the first side however. Flipping over the record...
CHAOS! “I Heard Her Call My Name” clicks together and then falls apart just as quickly. Demonic feedback-laced guitar playing refuses to be contained within rhythmic structures, counterpoints Lou Reed's vocals, “I felt my mind split open!” followed by a blast of feedback and an utterly self-destructive guitar solo. This is punk, no wave, noise rock, and dada, this is a band gleefully tearing apart rock and roll to reveal its true potential. So many bands have emulated this, but how many have accurately captured that pure vibe, that reckless but intelligent and systematic self-destruction, which all culminates with “Sister Ray.”
“Sister Ray” is the sound of a song going nowhere. The lyrics are repetitive and in deliberate bad taste, the rhythm section barely evolves over the entire course of seventeen minutes, but there's so much raw energy driving the song that it continues to go and go without any sort of destination in mind. It's the Grateful Dead for nihilists, instead of listening to a song slowly evolve we listen to a song slowly devolve. From this song it becomes obvious why bands like Times New Viking deliberately use poor recording equipment—the lack of audio quality allows one instrument to overpower the others, and turn the whole song into an indistinguishable pulsating mass of writhing noise. Then as this temporary burst of energy wears off and the voice fades back into the background, the song magically reappears. Each voice carries with it its own distinct hiss and each contributes to the overall aura of feedback, essentially turning the old hierarchy of tone over timbre on its head. It's like listening to a choir of lunatics, most of whom stop singing their designated music and start to scream instead.
Here is a record that over the course of six songs changed the rules of music forever.