The Velvet Underground: White Light / White Heat (1968)

(Verve)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

The purpose and thrust of the Velvet Underground, the one they were too mild to express on their Warhol-showered debut album, was the articulation of the secret urge of so many without the smarts or skills to pull it off: the literate garage band -- the absolute maximum capacity of poetry without pretentiousness, musical or otherwise. No one better has ever been born to realize this, not even his bandmates, than Lou Reed. Reed's vocal performance on White Light / White Heat is a tour de force, a slice of macabre magic. Putting Edgar Allan Poe into rock & roll has its own stark implications, but Reed is smart enough (smarter than the Doors or Jefferson Airplane by a zillion miles) to revel in what counts from the actual act of reading Poe, rather than being Poe -- the joy, the utter fixation and thrill, in the bizarre, the grotesque. He oozes with this unashamed flamboyance; he c-c-c-c-c-couldn't hit it sideways, awww it tickle him down to his toes, and then he feels his mind split open.

Reed's confidence and hyperactivity is leagues above his Dylanesque calm on The Velvet Underground & Nico, and this is the sole studio album on which the band's chops are on full display; in song after song, John Cale, Maureen Tucker, and Sterling Morrison impress tirelessly, passionate and giddy in their search for the most unhinged noises they can muster up. Some sophomore albums display newfound comfort, some are portraits of confusion, some certifiable documents of instant creative burnout. For the Velvet Underground, album number two marked a moment when all eyes were no longer on them, when they were blessed with freedom and cursed with a nonchalant public. Their tactic was to create a record with the boisterous, flowing anarchy of their live show. Cut loose from the Factory and all the image-making it entailed, no longer are they bound to uphold anything except their batshit, stunningly prescient idea of rock music -- riddled with in-the-red distortion, feedback, and scarcely contained cacophony. If anything, they're more outlandish than before -- but this time, it comes from deeper. It has almost nothing in common with their debut.

No Andy Warhol. No Nico. No films playing behind them, no dancers in front. Just guitars, bass, viola, and drums, with expertly minimalist production by Tom Wilson. It is almost impossible to believe that this man was thickening and sweetening Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" just a couple of years before. Now here he is, serving as less a producer than a documentary soundman, exposing the world to guitar insanity that would send Art Garfunkel cowering into the closet.

This band was twice as dangerous as even the heaviest of their most gifted peers -- the MC5, the Fugs, the 13th Floor Elevators, to name a few -- first of all because they would stick "Here She Comes Now" on an album with "I Heard Her Call My Name" and "Sister Ray" (but more on that later) and mostly because it was guitar (and drums and bass and viola) insanity. It could not be attributed to drugs or to political opinion or to metal illness. It was people enslaved by music, and it was forceful -- not in the way people think of the Velvets as being confrontational, but in the sense that you're with them or against them.

There is no sequencing logic to White Light / White Heat, nor is there much logic to the way the music is thrown together to begin with. Only six songs, and one of them is seventeen minutes, and another is hardly even a song. It has taken the Velvets less than three years to come to the conclusion that the Beatles would in the same year, over a decade after their formation: that it doesn't fucking matter. Like the White Album, the VU's LP spits in the eye of the Sgt. Pepper logic of an album arranged like a film, opening softly then flowing towards a climax and an ending. There is no easing into the Velvets' world. The brash intensity is there from the first second and it doesn't cease. The title track, a methamphetamine-oriented sequel to the far more maudlin "Heroin," is so loud you might not even notice how conventional it is, but the power is in the convention. It's a ruthless dance song, and you'll dance when you're not wondering what the hell Lou Reed is talking about. Who cares? This is pure rock & roll, tangential and derailed; at one point John Cale's bass goes off the deep end, and the whole band follows. It's beautiful... then the song ends.

"The Gift" runs as long as "Revolution 9" and is guaranteed to piss off the people who despise the latter song twice as much. While the Velvets jam at stage right, John Cale goes into Orson Welles mode, reading in unerring deadpan the run-on sentences and O.-Henry-meets-Poe logic of a short story created for a writing class by Lou Reed. The disturbing factor is that the experiment actually works, and that Reed's characters and situations are screamingly funny even when you know all about the twisted conclusion. "He needed her, and she wasn't there," Cale announced, followed with the unforgivingly precise sitcom-ironic "awwwww" from the others. You can't escape without a kind of adoration for the pathetic, deluded Waldo Jeffers. The humor is magnified by Cale's deftly understated reading, Lou's gleefully elaborate setting up of his twist, the neverending instrumental that conforms not once to the rhythm of the story, and the very fact that it's all on a rock album.

The Poe corner of Reed's psyche, which he would decades later explore on an overwrought concept album called The Raven, gets transplanted to the modern era with the botched lobotomy saga "Lady Godiva's Operation," a surprisingly intricate -- and melodic! -- ballad of a transsexual who, after seducing the doctor's sons, goes under the knife to horrific results. Singer Cale and terrifying interjector Reed see this as neither poetic justice nor anything of much more interest than the apathetically described junkies and hookers of the rest of the album, just a tool to get under the crowd's skin and terrorize them in perfect Hitchcock or Corman mold; the otherworldly sound effects at the climax are genuinely horrific (and intoxicating). The Byrdsian guitars and Cale's Welsh delicacy can deceive you into thinking nothing sinister is amiss, but then along comes Reed, whose flair for drama makes Phil Spector seem like Rick Rubin: "Now comes the moment of great, great decision! The doctor is making... his first incision!"

Without its surroundings, the eye-of-the-hurricane ballad "Here She Comes Now" might seem much more innocuous on a record where, otherwise, any given cut is scarier than the most "evil" moments of The Velvet Underground & Nico. The undeniably college rock-prophetic song (it has aged even less than the record's other cuts) is deceptively simple, and terrific; on the heels of "Godiva" and as a predecessor to the geyser-orgasm of the last two tracks, it's impossibly tense, even with appropriately shimmering production to match the subtle lyricism. This is a good example of a song that sounds and feels entirely different outside its original context, like looking at different colors side by side.

Every connotation of Side One explodes on "I Heard Her Call My Name," one of the most dizzying, intense songs of the '60s, and without a doubt the loudest. Musically, it's nothing less than an assault. While Moe keeps time with ruthless, jaw-dropping precision, the men lose themselves completely, and the guitar attack -- making no melodic sense and all the better for it -- builds for four and a half minutes without a break or decrease in velocity. There's no great climactic explosion -- that's saved for the next song -- and it all would mean nothing if not for Lou's barely coherent, ecstatic, murderous, insane lyrics and vocals. He wails out his story of pining for a woman who's "long dead and gone" and now he hears her calling him. Jumping again from the pages of Poe, this time his masterpiece "Ligeia," Reed looks us in the eye with emotions and desires not of this world or any, and he has the audacity to do it with the thrill-ride exuberance of James Brown. You can't explain that which defies definition, but in the end "I Heard Her Call My Name" is the very essence of everything rock & roll ever shot for. It makes all the sense in the world because it doesn't.

"Sister Ray" may or may not stand up to that, but it forces you to think it does. Mastered louder than any of the other songs here, it intends to make an instant mark -- or wound. Again Reed's tale, told with the enthusiasm and vocabulary of a little boy in a playground, centers around death, but here he adds prostitution, drugs, sailors, and blowjobs to the mix. Someone's just come back from Carolina, someone's sucking on a ding dong, someone needs a dollar, someone's staining the carpet, someone's been murdered, and the police are knocking on the door. The aural attack of the music, similar to the previous song but making its point (or lack of point) gradually instead of all at once, is too seductive for me to keep the characters (Duck, Sally, and their pals) straight yet Reed seems to know them all like brothers and sisters, but he too gives in to the music eventually. "Whip it on me, Jim! Whip it on me, Jim!" Poe arrives again -- "Who's that knocking at my chamber door?" The music could be a story in itself... it begins with standard Velvets guitars-and-feedback, then someone (Cale, I think) sits at an organ and it's louder than everybody else and everybody else tries to be louder, and eventually the song mutates into a white noise dirge and it gets faster and louder and goes on for seventeen minutes. Legend has it an engineer walked out. How could you start this without needing closure on it? Well, you can and will because there is no closure, it's all a moment. Seventeen minutes and it's still a moment, no second wasted. It's funny and danceable and disturbing and unforgettable. They had better songs, but none that explained their dynamic appeal so well; everyone gives the song every ounce of their energy, and it is -- recognized, ignored mistakes and all -- a triumph.

What's endearing about White Light / White Heat is not the veneer of cool that's undeniably there; Reed wouldn't learn to be himself until after John Cale left the band. In simple terms, it's the thrill of a band that's employing the studio as a tool without leaping too far into its capabilities, and doing things more for the hell of it than to make an impression. To be less cerebral, it's a band that has found a way to stick to the wonderful power of rock & roll at its basic, most primal form yet somehow take it further, expanding its horizons and running to unheard-of lengths with it. They're having fun. They're toying with us. And we love it.

[Revised from an essay originally posted at d-b.com in 2003.]

[SEE ALSO:]
The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

Panda Bear: Tomboy (2011)

(Paw Tracks)

!! CAUTION !!

You know why Wild Honey is a better Beach Boys record than the nebulous evolving theory of Smile? It gots soul, that's why. "Our Prayer" might be a disarming recording, but it's the glory without the guts; even if "Darlin'" doesn't move you more, "The Warmth of the Sun" surely will, unless you're a fuckin' alien or a prog rocker.

Or a fan of Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, possessive of one of the greatest voices currently in the indie rock scene. What you essentially get with his work in Animal Colective or alone is an eternity of "Our Prayer" as concept, a painfully extensive exercise in the belief that, well, pretty is enough. On Lennox's prior record, Person Pitch, he tempered indulgences like the overwrought, melodramatic 1940s film score "Bros" with beds of music, and even occasionally songs. Only once on the followup -- the pleasing enough "Alsatian Darn" -- does he cop to such philistine temptations. The rest of the time, he expects the aural immensity of his vocals to carry fifty full minutes all by themselves.

But even things as nice as Lennox's pipes can get old after a while, particularly without any serious variance to back it up. True fatigue sets in around the ridiculous "Surfer's Hymn," an all-too-literal blotch of saccharine choir practice feted by -- of course -- the sound of the ocean. Before that, it's so difficult to distinguish Tomboy from Person Pitch it barely seems worth the trouble. And afterward, the boredom and sameness grow overbearing; Lennox wails against the darkness with something like enthusiasm, but he is in serious need of structure. There's not even the grounded emotion and vague wit of his band's "Guys' Eyes" or "My Girls," and certainly not the open-armed loveliness of "Bluish."

Those scattered Animal Collective triumphs aside, the one time I've truly loved Panda Bear is the same moment as the one time I've truly loved Pantha du Prince; the pair's collaboration "Stick to My Side" from last year's Black Noise is heavenly, Lennox's voice as instrument and not centerpiece, giving Pantha's noodling something warm to hang onto. These two need each other. Or at least, they both need something more than they're capable of on their own. As it is, Tomboy is basically sludge. You might find something lovely and worth remembering in the puddle, but parsing through the in-your-face mess will take longer than most of us have to spare.

[SEE ALSO:]
Person Pitch (2007)

Faces: The Definitive Rock Collection (1970-75)

(Rhino)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Rod Stewart's in my bottom half-dozen rock performers of all time, the rare individual who completely shuts my faculties off and makes my hair stand on end, and no, it's not just because of his supposedly sellout pop records later on, which if anything are more entertaining to me, but also -- geez, I'm sorry, but I will die happy if the opening notes of "Maggie May" never cross my ears again. (This loathing of Stewart is mild compared to my feelings for James Taylor, however.) But "Ooh La La" by his old band the Faces, on which Stewart doesn't sing lead (one of a handful of such instances on this two-disc compilation) has been an absolutely beloved song to me ever since, naturally, its expert placement at the end of Rushmore -- it's transcendent and sad, perfectly suited to that film. So I figured, maybe these two things will cancel each other out and I will somehow end up digging the Faces.

Nope. As Stewart would put it, no, no, no, no, no. This is pure bonehead-blues wank. I couldn't even make it through most of the songs. Nothing even approaches "Ooh La La," which on close inspection reflects the same idiotic vagina-hating bullshit you'd suspect of Stewart himself at his worst -- but the music is irresistible enough that it takes the wind out of its wrongheaded convictions. Maybe. Or maybe now that I know the song is basically about the fact that women are abusive sluts who will stomp all over innocent childlike Men, it will lose some of its magic. Then I can delete this entire shitty folder instead of everything except the one track.

I have absolutely nothing else to say about this tripe, so let's just run down some of my favorite lyrics from the bits I managed to listen to (and was able to remotely comprehend; the man just doesn't enunciate).

Well, well, hello and how are you?
Fancy seeing you here, don't let it show
No look, no one must know

It's hard to believe that this is the place
Where we were so happy all our lives

Miss Judy, she was moody
Owned a sweaty farm in old Alabama
I was just eighteen, crude and mean
And all I needed was to get my own way, get my own way

Your love is fading,
I can feel your love fading,
Woman it's fading away from me

In the mornin' don't say you love me
'Cause I'll only kick you out of the door
I know your name is Rita
'cause your perfume's smelling sweeter
Since when I saw you down on the floor

Most shameful moment of all: a five and a half-minute cover of Chuck Berry's sublime "Memphis." [pulls hair out]

One of the allmusic.com keywords for this compilation is "Guys Night Out." No wonder.

The Flaming Lips with Neon Indian EP (2011) + Flaming Lips 2011 craziness [Gummy Skull + Two Blobs Fucking]

(Warner Bros.)

RECOMMENDED
[** see note at bottom **]

In 2009, the Flaming Lips released their best album in a decade, the darkly psychedelic Embryonic. Since then they've been given goodwill from their fanbase and their record label in the form of, as Wayne Coyne told Billboard, the "freedom to fuck around." This campaign of nuttiness began with the 2010 release of an album-length cover version of The Dark Side of the Moon, which I admittedly skipped. In 2011, though, in amongst an outpouring of oddities have been three major dumps of intriguing new material from one of the world's most prolific and creatively restless bands.

The most conventional of these so far has been the 12" EP-length collaboration with Mexican chillwavers Neon Indian, not at all an obvious match for the Lips. The release itself was issued on vinyl only, the severely limited number of copies distributed to record stores personally by band members. The content, if you can find it, does not disappoint: The most traditional cut is opener "Is David Bowie Dying," an appropriately droning killing off of a hero that sounds, indeed, like David Bowie -- plodding and tense like Talking Heads' "The Overload," the song is a must. Fans are also likely to appreciate Minutemen sequel "Do YOu Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth (Part 2)," on which Neon Indian's influence is impossible to detect. But I'm even more attracted to the two oddities in the middle, the experimental headfuck "You Don't Respond" and the meandering "Alan's Theremin," a hypnotic but appealingly minimalistic jam that recalls some of Yo La Tengo's best extended lullabys.



The virtues of the two middle selections, "Theremin" especially, carry over to the Lips' best song of the year to date, the arresting, minimal but gorgeous "Hillary's Time Machine Machine," a nine-minute trance into nocturnal guitar and a sleepy comedown. Simultaneously comforting and creepy, it's a piece of instrumental rock mastery. Unfortunately, the only way to hear it (legally) is to purchase the foreboding object seen above, bite into it, and slobber your way through a big hunk of candy until you find a USB flash drive that includes four new Flaming Lips songs, totalling twenty-five minutes. All for the low ebay price of $199 and rising!

Don't pay $199 and you will be missing out on two tracks from the Lips' obnoxious, indulgent side -- the wah-wah video game soundtrack "In Our Bodies, Out of Our Heads" and the '80s Bowie riff "Walk with Me" -- but also a soaring, triumphant chorus on the lovely "Drug Chart." One has to wonder about what the bosses at Warner Music Group think of a stunt like this. I couldn't even get them to send me an Iron & Wine press kit this January, but they'll underwrite a few hundred giant gummy skulls? Releasing music in this manner equates essentially to, if you're very naive, not releasing it at all or -- more realistically - releasing it for free, because I'd wager barely a dozen of the 1,365 listeners "Walk with Me" has on last.fm gnawed their way through those colorful brains.



Luckily, the other big Lips moment of the year, and curiously the one that seemed to ignite the most fanfare, was free. Free! Through the magic of YouTube, the Lips both minimized their Zaireeka (their boxed set of 4 CDs that had to be played simultaneously) experiment by reducing its length to about three minutes and maximized it by requiring twelve YouTube videos to be played at once. And calling it "Two Blobs Fucking," thus guaranteeing that the corresponding SteveHoffman.TV thread would mostly consist of generational hemming and hawing about "that word." Various web experiments have been put in place to allow the twelve to start automatically and simultaneously, but one wonders -- if human error isn't the point of projects like this, what is the point? That is, if I'm understanding all this correctly, and if Brian Eno's experiments in the same capacity, which predated the Lips', are a worthy guide, I am. If every version of "Two Blobs Fucking" is the same, why bother? Is this all just to exercise our clicky fingers? At any rate, it's easy to find a synced audio-only rip, which will reveal that "Blobs" is a curio and not much else.

When I was a teenager in the '90s, as a function of both my obsessive personality and the fact that one of my first favorite bands was R.E.M. whose rarities tend to be sublime, if I grew seriously infatuated with a band I had to own every song they released, ever. All the b-sides and compilation tracks, which in the pre-Napster world were often a bitch and a half to find; I collected the confusing two-part import singles to get this or that elusive track, I slaved over whether this or that live track or remix was worth the trouble as opposed to an all-new studio cut, and I remember trolling pawn shop aisles for weird VA comps like DGC Rarities, No Alternative, and the Batman Forever soundtrack. I've gotten over that -- there's a Yo La Tengo song I've never heard and cannot find anywhere on a vinyl compilation I see on ebay for some extravagant price every day, and I am not even tempted, as badly as I want to hear the song -- but I can't help thinking of my 14 year-old self when bands like the Lips do something of this nature, and it continues to bug me when I can't have all the music by a great band easily at my fingertips. I don't begrudge Coyne and company the fun of coming up with wild and crazy alternatives to simple album or EP or single formats, and I strongly prefer their support of independent record stores to the tendency toward relatively dull marginalia like "iTunes exclusives." But I'll repeat the point I made in talking about the Mountain Goats cassette recently: I wish stuff could just be available and not suspended inside gross gooey candy and outdated media. But I suppose those days are over.

[Note on Recommendation: The boldfaced opinion at the top reflects these three releases taken as one whole, on a purely musical basis. Caveat to follow -- These Lips releases are commanding outrageous prices on ebay as we speak. Hardcore fans who can get a copy of the Neon Indian 12" for less than $40 are advised to do so, as the record is consistently very good. The gummy skull, while it contains songs that'd be above average b-sides, is consumer fraud for anyone who isn't a psychotic Lips fan, as even directly from the band it's being sold for $150 or so. I have trouble thinking of a USB stick inside a piece of candy, particularly one that's $150 or so, as an "EP" or "single" or pretty much anything. Call me old fashioned. This is at bottom just four Lips rarities on a flash drive, nothing earth-shaking, and certainly nothing as unified as the Neon Indian collab. So do what I did; hit bit torrent (or your crazy friend) for it and stick it a folder with a synced-up "Two Blobs." Voila, you have caught up with the Flaming Lips. For now.]

Adam & the Ants: Stand and Deliver- Very Best Of (1977-95)

(Columbia)

Thanks to the late professional dickweed Malcolm McLaren, these New Romantic touchstones have over the years been primarily known to me via their connection to one of my favorite bands of the early '80s, Bow Wow Wow; McLaren stole away the original incarnation of the Ants, save their stalwart leader, to form Bow Wow Wow around Annabella Lwin, making irresistible pop that isn't our concern here. A fuckwit move to be sure, but maybe it was meant to be. While I can certainly recognize the virtue and influence of Adam Ant, I have a hard time enjoying his music nearly as much as Lwin and company's, largely as a result of a personal quirk -- his voice is nails on the chalkboard to me. I don't want to, as I've done in the past, appear to be dismissing great music purely on this basis; people hear things differently, not anyone's fault, and in my case Yoko Ono and Josephine Olausson are like music down from on high, Bach on the satellite in Dirk Gently, and Adam Ant and Sigur Ros bug me so much I have to leave the room. I don't know what it is or how to explain it. It's probably genetic. But whatever is there that's good, it is literally impossible for me to hear.

That doesn't mean I haven't spent a number of happy evenings with "Antmusic," pop music brimming with genuine wit, and I can't deny the appeal of Adam Ant's stubborn nonconformity (compared to the practiced refinement of, say, the Jam or the Kinks). The gem of his career is the completely undeniable "Kings of the Wild Fronier," one of the true juggernaut dance songs of the last thirty years -- both left-field and startlingly populist. It gets anyone moving, alleged cultural robbery and all, and has been a life-saver on many DJing excursions. Its dynamics, its two-drummer attack, its apocalyptic shapeshifting -- all beyond classic, beyond grand, into scary.

As a compilation, Stand and Deliver presents all sorts of problems and frustrations. Credited to Adam and the Ants, it in fact consists in large part of material from Ant's solo career -- nearly all of which is trend-following junk. Even the hit "Goody Two Shoes" sounds tired and anonymous compared to the full-band force of the Ants' records. This would be forgivable, making it a one-swoop curiosity, if the songs were presented in any sensible order, but they aren't arranged chronologically and certainly don't follow any thematic thrust, Ant's mid-'80s MOR banalities coming awkwardly between stabs of youth and energy, like "Kokomo" sandwiched between "Surfer Girl" and "I Get Around."

But this is one of those moments when I confess the bigger problem is me. In the same way I've (gulp) never been able to get past Elvis Costello's incessant squaking to really fall in love with his music, in the same way that for all my problems with his dubious character the real reason George is my least favorite Beatle is I think he sounds like a giant-throatted rat, in the same way that Robert Plant sends me screaming into the night, I cannot handle Adam Ant's voice. The chirping, the in-your-face obnoxiousness that all seems quite deliberate is too much for me, to the point of being actually intolerable. I was unable to listen to this disc in one sitting, and had to split it up. The second and third time through, at which point I skipped most of the solo cuts, I was in the car, which broke it up into four tiny bits but Ant still wore on me quickly. I do wish he had recorded more material like debut "Young Parisians," on which he affects a nonchalance that doesn't seem compromised, seeping with his eccentric characteristics but also distant enough not to give me that rubbing-on-a-balloon feeling.

We should, of course, move on now. It's not typically the goal of this blog to take down material that is simply not within my realm of taste (which is why there will be no reviews of Led Zep and Nirvana records in this space, because such actions would be pointless); I was in this case genuinely curious how I'd feel about a full Ant comp. But I will quickly add that hearing the Ants' music, disregarding all my issues, is a surprisingly strong rush of nostalgia. There is more here to admire than style, than a certain radiance of spirit that seemed more possible then, particularly in the UK, but that may in fact be Ant's legacy. I'm really not the one to ask, unfortunately.

Gang of Four: Content (2011)

(Yep Roc)

RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

Two post-punk titans issued albums in the first few weeks of 2011. Wire has been surprisingly prolific in the last decade, but Gang of Four's return was a bit of a shock. Both albums are strong, but for what it's worth, it's the Four's that feels most vital and full of youth -- and not just because their sound has been more openly appropriated into the mainstream by a younger generation. But Wire's songs are better, so it's kind of a wash. Anyway, both releases are worth your time.

With the Beatles (1963)

(Parlophone)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

With the Beatles is everything. If the Beatles' career had ended after their life-affirming, infinitely powerful second album, released the day JFK was shot, it would be enough to secure their legend. It contains all the detail, idiosyncrasy, urgency needed to make the idea and perfect execution of rock & roll clear to anyone. Arguably nothing else in the LP form can compete with its immediacy. So what if rock & roll was no longer new by 1963, so what if this record was the shot in the arm required to wake it up? And so what if its most sublime moment, its crowning touch, appears in its first thirty seconds? John Lennon's first words to his adoring disciples (almost exclusively European at this point; the first trip to America was still months away) in "I Won't Be Long": "Every night when everybody has fun / Here am I, sitting all on my own." Fuck sex and drugs... that is rock & roll. That is the spirit and the truth. Every second of the rest of the album is an illustration of Lennon's manifesto.

Behind that massive voice, the Beatles make good on their Please Please Me promises by playing with even more graceful abandon. Their proficiency with studio work has increased, and they now have the luxury of spending more than one day on an LP, but it has not softened their impact. The songs on their second goround gain a stark eloquence, a musical dialogue of their own, and most importantly, they're loud. And if you're not playing them with the volume pumped to the maximum, you are not hearing them as they must be heard. It's been said that With the Beatles at top volume essentially approximates the sound of the Beatles at the Cavern, which is useful since only a handful of recordings of their pre-Beatlemania performances survive. But it's beyond that -- get this on loud enough and it is, quite precisely, punk rock. In England in 1963. If you spend enough time thinking about it your head will explode. So don't. Just scream and dance, like they did then.

The opening three cuts ("It Won't Be Long," "All I've Got to Do," "All My Loving") say it all, slyly coating the band's pop smarts and terrifying abrasiveness with a nuance and care passed over on the prior record in favor of impact. The Beatles in the fall of 1963 are not just wild dumb teenage sex -- they're smart, they're sensual, they're unstoppable. But they're also very, very serious -- no light sardonics or cuts into the mystique here, all detached quality control and impassioned playing and singing -- and they are no longer betraying the naive charm of London music industry newcomers. Already tight professionals as a live band by the time they signed to Parlophone, With reveals the rapidity of their learning process. In the interim between the two records, two singles had seen release, neither of them included on either long-form LP. "From Me to You," though a strong enough composition, sounded tentative and confused, a lily-fingered follwup to the fire and madness of the album, but its b-side, "Thank You Girl," suggested a phenomenal, almost sinister, developing of familiarity with the secrets of studio pop. By "She Loves You," only the band's fourth single, they are masters. Producer George Martin, always an improviser and always an asset, lends the song an almost alien force by layering on sheets of noise, making Ringo's cymbals sound as though they never stop crashing, making John and Paul's harmonies seem to extend forever in some rock & roll hall of mirrors. And they managed it all in the context of a song that was both improbably hard-edged, almost unbearably intense rock & roll... and sexually charged teenage music.

That same blanket of noise populates With the Beatles, constant but at times deliberately impenetrable -- how many times must one listen to "Devil in Her Heart" before that primal wall behind everything is actually revealed to be John and Paul's backing vocals? But even at the beginning, it was on the singles that the band showed their chops, and on the albums that they expressed themselves most deeply. It's a curious paradox that the original condition of the pop album as something not many fans actually listened to or cared about is likely what led the Beatles to save their darkest, most ambitious and experimental material for their LPs, which in turn led to the perhaps wrongheaded vaunting of the album as the definitive form of pop music. Clearly the Beatles cared a lot about this material, all the same; whether it was their decision or Martin's, it's telling that unlike Please Please Me, With the Beatles contains not one song issued as a single. In the end, nearly half of their albums would score record-breaking sales without the aid of singles. Instead, With scores on nothing more than its material, which is often bracing in its craft and intelligence -- innovative, fascinating chord structures and harmonies, adventurous compositions, and most of all their tight ("tighter!"), intimidating presence as a band, and their absolute conviction, their undiluted passion, as singers -- Lennon especially.

Lennon's alienated "It Won't Be Long," with its pressing and anguished performance and his trademark sympathy for the outcast, closes with a hell of a dramatic moment, turning the similarly jazzy finale of "She Loves You" upside down: an improvised, sweet but sudden climax to its royal mess of crazed emotions. This leads directly into what is certainly the finest song on With the Beatles and may indeed be (heavily competing with "Don't Let Me Down," "Help!," "I Call Your Name," and "Strawberry Fields Forever," only one of which is on an LP) the greatest Beatles song of all, John's tender "All I've Got to Do." The composition, tipping a hat to Smokey Robinson, is airtight and gorgeous, its stunning descending melodic trick reprised briefly and famously on "Not a Second Time," but the performance is surely the most riveting in a catalog that would soon be dominated by studio playtime that, however impressive, can never compete with the sound of John Lennon going off on a vocal tangent over this band playing together, better than ever before or since, as a unit.

As at so many other points, as much as all four Beatles are necessary to make this magic tick, it is Lennon who sets the scene and leads it to its peak. The passion and sex in his voice are irresistible, impossibly elegant, quickly displaying the reason he may be the greatest male singer in a field full of masters from Sam Cooke to Lou Reed, the things he does hypnotic: his wraparound of the "IIIII-hiiiii-IIIIII" hook worthy of Billie Holiday, his slip in and out of the intoxicating baritone on "On meeeeeee yeah," a revelatory moment that would be recalled on the Richard Lloyd guitar solo in Television's "Elevation" -- you think you understand the song's limits until Lennon and Lloyd dip below the ground. The build of the powerfully direct, communicative chorus, the way it grows warmer each time, is a magic seduction -- the teenage telephone tale never condescended to or deflated, no Phil Spector melodrama required. And the "ohhh!" just before the last "You just gotta call on me," and finally the band's tour de force entrance into John's sublime humming coda.

It's not an insult to the others that John Lennon dominates the best Beatles recordings; he was simply that astonishing. Nor is it an insult that "All I've Got to Do" destroys "Yesterday," "Michelle," "Imagine," "God Only Knows," everything -- this is the sound of uncluttered, unchecked, un-fucked up emotion pouring out of a human being. No second-hand documentary bullshit definition of rock & roll can approach its beauty and delicacy. To hear it blasting from speakers grand or small, to witness it, is a gift worth giddy excitement nearly five decades later.

But Paul too is capable, on "All My Loving," of a love song that brims with the same undiluted energy as the Beatles' idols -- it's rollicking country-western that, despite its ballad template, moves along with the same restless, driving speed as the rockers, picking up the pace considerably from "All I've Got to Do" without attempting its hard-soft dynamics in remotely the same fashion. Paul offers all the cushioning the song's sharp-edged arrangement needs, while George's solo underscores its Carl Perkins roots in a moment that peaks the populist divinities of With the Beatles' opening salvo.

Generally, With approaches its songs from a more controlled atmosphere than the debut; none of the three masterworks described above could have been possible on that remarkably divergent effort. The choices of covers here, scattered now rather than appearing in a row, are also more interesting, with the exception of the vaguely charming but slightly regrettable maxed-out balladry Paul shows off on "Till There Was You," a step down from the oddball mystery of "A Taste of Honey." The others are capable of spinning killer new angles on classics, like Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven," and even standing alongside the immortal performances of masters, as on the still-flooring versions of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "You Really Got a Hold on Me" and the Marvelettes' "Please Mister Postman." Without the virtue of songwriting adventure, the covers become the place for startling, savory rushes of stabbing guitar, unstoppable beat, and indescribable frenzy. Banalities like "(There's A) Devil in Her Heart" are obliterated by the Beatles' hasty passion. And with Lennon at the helm, a girl group classic like "Postman" becomes exhilarating, a tearing-your-hair-out plead to a lost companion, coming apart with desperation. Musically, the revision of "Hold on Me," hardly a song it would seem remotely possible to improve, is even more extreme, stripping it of everything but minimalist instrumentation, Ringo (who careens miles ahead of all others, as usual), and the gasping, relentless drama of the voices. Add "Don't want to kiss you / But I need to" to the grand listing of iconic sophomore-LP moments.

And then there are the originals. Even the throwaways are virtually flawless. Ringo fucks up "I Wanna Be Your Man," already released as a Rolling Stones 45, with manic Indra-sized gusto; dig John and Paul's simultaneous scream of joy ahead of the bridge. The Motown knockoff "Hold Me Tight" is driven into oblivion by a perfect rhythm guitar line, the harmonies stretching upward forever. George's debut as composer, "Don't Bother Me," is haunting grade-A Brit invasion arrogance. And try to escape the grip of John's bruising "Little Child," as hook-filled as any Beatles single.

If the stark, stylish, gloomy album cover wasn't enough to suggest more in play on With the Beatles than the brightly lit corridors and grinning faces of Please Please Me, the last three songs fully realize a menace that had existed underneath the surface brightness of the Beatles' music since at least their first trip to Hamburg, now accidentally set to coincide with an approaching descent into darkness for the Western world, in particular the country that the Beatles would forever alter in the year ahead. It's simple enough to draw a cultural diagram, though; more interestingly, one actually seems to be hearing the beginnings of John Lennon's "Primal Scream" output, the confessional mode that would culminate seven years later on Plastic Ono Band but would in the meantime produce gut-splitting songs like "Help!" and the bulk of albums like A Hard Day's Night and Rubber Soul. In the bleak shred of his voice on "Not a Second Time" and "Money," he seems to be reliving the loss of his mother and (to a lesser extent) his father, of his childhood, of Stuart Sutcliffe, of all the endurances and dreads that brought him to the recording studio in which he now sits. He is living it, still, and on iPods around the world, he will be living it in perpetuity.

At first or even twelfth glance, "Devil in Her Heart" -- led by George -- is a relatively minor entry in the canon. But pay attention, with or without the aid of the Donays' obscure original, and live for a time with esoteric majesty and odd mysticism of the harmonies; the willingness to go crazy-eccentric for a cover dates back at least to their midnight destructions of "Your Feets Too Big" and the first album's "Boys," but that swirl is something new to the Beatles, something almost creepily foretelling. But they never again recorded anything like "Not a Second Time," and no one has. Turning around the ecstacy of Side One with last-minute menace, Lennon sounds ruthless, battle-lines drawn, as the tension escalates around him. At first he wails alone with George Martin's piano, later the centerpiece of an otherworldly solo, before Ringo's unflappable mechanic drumming pushes it all ahead. His fill after the first verse and the piano solo that follows need no words to humanize the suggestion of the moment. There is no protection or forgiveness within this track... a four-wall trap of agony and fury, John's wails filling every inch.

While there's little that's theatrical about With the Beatles, the band's entity and their individual personas create an effect of apocalypse. On "Money," possibly the band's finest cover, Lennon nearly betters his own wrenching "Twist and Shout" vocal with layers of bravado and angst behind smirking irony; it culminates in the spontaneous electricity of what may be the most important line he would ever sing... "I WANT TO BE FREE." It builds and builds some more, oppressive and unforgiving, until Lennon seems to be digging himself slowly out of a hole, out of the hole of all of his losses, into the cynicism that can save him, a world away from the vibrant loveliness of "All I've Got to Do" -- his triumphant final line carrying a John Lydon sneer, "That's what I want," at which point he seems to slap the rest of the music away nonchalantly. Okay, that's it, I'm done with you. And what's next. Mick Jagger's entire career cannot compete.

George Martin communicates the chaos across these fourteen songs with the aplomb of a grand but modest showman; he means to aid the boys in documenting their actual sound, as had long been his mission. His aim is selfless, not to make a name for himself by capturing some nervous energy or undercurrent, to frame them as whatever he could fathom. His decisions only underline the band's virtues, and With the Beatles and its followup, A Hard Day's Night, captures the beautiful moment when these forces sat perfectly in sync with a band in harmony. Martin is so sympathetic to the Beatles' chaos it's incredible he was removed from their generation; much would be made of his sober sonic empathy with drug use in later years, but his application of youth to what had long been a routine enough production gig is far more intriguing and refreshing. And despite the croaking angst from audiophiles and other dweebs about the stereo separation on these early records, Martin hits it just right on either mix, though the mono inarguably sounds best with one significant exception. In mono "Money" comes across merely as a strong effort, a worthy sibling to Barrett Strong's excellent original; in stereo, it blisters with want and electricity, almost sickeningly. And this one of many things it's astounding Martin was able to capture so well.

There are probably better albums. There are a few (very few) better Beatles albums, although only Rubber Soul makes as strong a case for them as a four-piece band. But there is no album with such vitality, no album that speaks directly into the heart of anyone with such focus and enthusiasm. This is life, immortalized, the boundless talent and intelligence of four men guiding it along through a universe of energy and light. We're fortunate to have it. It really does seem as though they could do no wrong back then. How lovely it is to revisit the time when the world was completely within the grasp of the Beatles, and when they had ideas for what to do with it when they earned it.

[Substantially revised from a review posted at d-b.com in 2003.]