Annie Lennox: Diva (1992)

(Arista)

RECOMMENDED

Eurythmics certainly had their moments, although in the grand scheme of boy-girl synthpop duos they were no Yaz, but there was always a nagging suspicion that the immensely talented Annie Lennox was being held back by keyboarding weirdo Dave Stewart. That seems to be confirmed by Diva, an album that -- hearing it today -- I really just want to hug. It's all here, all of the charms of early '90s adult contemporary pop: a buried worldbeat influence, numerous bows and bids for the then-thriving mainstream club music scene, all couched in the standard singer-songwriterly pastiches that here take on a strangely lovable gloss and glow. In much the same way that Leonard Cohen transcended the dated trappings of modern-day pop music by engaging with and burying himself in it, Lennox gains strength from the vagaries of lush soft-porn production: it emphasizes her voice, internalizes the emotion, makes it all somehow more intimate.

And the singing -- which she unmistakably designs as the reason to buy and hear the record -- is as technically staggering as ever, and here is given a red-carpet approach appropriate to the disc's title. After years of being in an alternative rock band that flirted yearningly with the mainstream, Lennox now approximates a grand lady coming out, a star among stars. The charming "Why" is merely a prelude for the kind of contained, urgent peak that the single "Walking on Broken Glass" is -- of course you remember it from the radio and MTV back then, but do you remember how maddening its articulated desires really are? In 1992, there was literally nothing quite like the manner in which the obliquely classicist arrangement builds up and explodes at the chorus, turning what in most songs would be an emotional climax to merely the beginning of a powerful, stirringly suggestive repetition of the title phrase. Lennox owns this moment, and the eccentricity and beauty of that single is unmatched by anything else, save a bonus track included with most copies of the CD: a simple and splendidly evocative version of Dubin-Warren's "Keep Young and Beautiful," the kind of selection that nearly justifies modern pop singers' odd fixation upon covering standards.

Generally, however, Lennox's compositions are powerful and accomplished, even if "Broken Glass" is clearly her best offering (which it remains today). Her songs mostly exist to give her an excuse to wind and wrap her soulful voice around something that will really exercise it, and the beautifully dated production (by, somehow inevitably, Steve Lipson) seems almost designed in advance to afford future nostalgia to the prospective consumer. These keep even the lackluster, or at least fairly ordinary tunes (roughly half) from growing tired. "Stay by Me," just to toss out an example, is a trite nothing on paper, but Lennox makes something out of it, and you end up having a fine time.

So does she, which helps and hurts; the sole shortcoming here in comparison to her work with Eurythmics is that there seemed more mystery then, more pain and more fear -- and clearly, although those records were often ambitious failures (even the group's Greatest Hits has too many duds; only three of their full-length albums offer real consistency), their songs were formed as songs more than showcases and therefore had a bit more sophistication, tempering Lennox's own impulse toward mere recitations of the R&B and soul vocabularies. But maybe reciting the R&B and soul vocabularies is a worthwhile endeavor, though it's hard to know why something as left-field as "Broken Glass" could splash out with nothing to match it.

But by the same token, a greater degree of comfort on the vocalist's part means her work is more assured than ever here, and I'd take "Money Can't Buy It" and the melodically resonant "Cold" over something like the blank-faced radio bid "Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves." Lennox proves herself capable of rendering dunderheaded phrases ("I believe in the power of creation / I believe in the good vibration" and "I could die here in your arms") either unnoticeable or somehow powerful. The emotional peak, disregarding the aforementioned opening splash, is the international hit "Little Bird," and as much "of its time" as it is, it's a dance cut that still sounds incredibly strong, an utter triumph of hook-filled pop smarts, joyfully sung and married to a perfect beat. It also sounds like a Eurythmics song, more than anything else here, and I'm not sure what that says exactly.

Dent May: Do Things (2012)

(Paw Tracks)

RECOMMENDED

Read my Metro Times review.

This sophomore record by one of our most charming current singer-songwriters is consistently catchy and danceable, but in the manner of Heartbeat City or a lot of power pop, it does get a bit sickly and old after a while, and for all the wide-eyed and sincere platitudes in the lyrics ("do things your own way," etc.), nothing here stands up to the fearless "Parents," which makes me want to dance and celebrate like nothing else this year.

Ray Charles: Ultimate Hits Collection (1953-90)

(Rhino)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It seems an unwise decision to try and "explain" a song as immediate and joyous as "Hallelujah, I Love Her So," or one as self-explanatory and felt as "Georgia on My Mind"; Ray Charles' best songs are brilliant because they strike our emotional chords deftly and confidently, and they do this with expertise because that's what Charles, when paying his dues in the '40s, learned how to do. Even apart from his pop success, Charles is the single most important performer in the transitional period between the birth of rhythm & blues and the fruition of rock & roll; few singers, writers, musicians were ever more inventive, more stirringly devoted to an evolving, experimental sound -- all delivered with vocal immediacy anyone else in the world could envy. Charles resisted the "genius" tag, but in the context of 20th century pop music, he's a god among few others. The power of his best work has not diminished an iota over the decades.

Along with the Beatles, Charles embodies a certain conservative ideal of the way in which sheer worth ethic begats creativity; this awkwardly brushes up against the liberal ideal that allows an artist to develop over time, sometimes a great deal of time, which is necessary for a musician like him and is no longer possible in the business -- so if you wonder why we've never had another Ray Charles, that's one important reason. In his early days as a hard-working performer, he was remarkable only for his consistency, like the Beatles in their pre-Hamburg period; history records that he began his career as a remakably consistent and expressive jump blues singer, but not a unique one. He was one among many trying to earn a living.

You can hear a bit of the glimpse of the jump blues Ray Charles, sounding unbelievably young with his gravelly voice yet to be ravaged by aging and vice, on "Mess Around," which also embodies shades of boogie woogie. A smash hit on the R&B charts inaugurating a lucrative decade on Atlantic Records, the cut depicts both a man and a genre of music in transition. You can sense the landscape of soul music beginning to change and open up, but in contrast to so many records of the early '50s, the seams are only there if you try to find them; the music itself remains direct and affecting with no qualification. By the time of "A Fool for You," two years later, Charles is exhibiting pure soul in his playing and singing, his piano fills delicate and tricky, the dramatic spreading out of the arrangement all operating from a doctrine of honesty and vulnerability raised to a high art. That's soul music, right? And moreover, that's the work of a professional and exquisite creator of grand pop recordings, recordings that encapsulate a kind of miniature history of the American century -- jazz collides with blues collides with gospel collides with R&B -- and Charles' understanding of all of the above is nuanced and cool-headed, a teacher who uses his lessons to quietly (or loudly) deal with his personal agonies.

It could probably be argued that someone like Ray Charles is born with his gifts, and it's probably true that his patience, his gifts and his spirit were his from the beginning. But his unique abilities as a performer and his dogged ambition were an outgrowth of his years of experience working his ass off as a performer in night clubs in Florida and later Seattle. He began to record early, issuing a number of one-off sides on various labels before securing his Atlantic deal; he was constantly learning and empowering himself, and it was for this reason that he appeared from seemingly nowhere on Atlantic and managed to transform the framework in which he was operating. Even at his most conventional (the big band shades of "Greenbacks," the nocturnal melancholy on "Drown in my Own Tears") he was invariably exciting and enthusiastic, the consummate performer now performing for everyone.

Looking over charts and discographies, one finds that it's easy to make a case for any number of Charles' singles as a "breakthrough" moment, but the most frequent song to gather around is the #1 R&B hit "I Got a Woman" from 1955 -- a song whose down-on-its-knees adoration and affection is tempered oddly by both an unusual level of frank powerlessness ("she give me money") and misogyny; it's a placid enough song that subtly reveals ugly, violent ideas. Yet it's wonderful, of course, it just cries out to be followed by Etta James' "Tough Lover." For me, the key single of the first half of Charles' Atlantic deal is the feverish "Lonely Avenue," a gospel-suggestive raw soul, dramatically enunciated so that every word resonates, its rhythm otherworldly and unreal; Doc Pomus wrote the number, but Ray Charles transformed it and made some left-field madness of it that he then rode to the R&B top ten. A remarkable era this was indeed. Great as all the innovation is -- you can hear the virtual invention of the "Motown sound" on "Ain't That Love" -- there is today much to be gained from hearing a relaxed Charles charm his way through pure sleazy blues and beautiful sap, typically with incredibly nuanced vocals like that of "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'," and without any context necessary we can bask in his glow.

But innovation knocks on the door and won't leave -- who can say whether Charles' sexually charged magnum opus "What'd I Say" was intended to be as world-shaking as it turned out to be, a breathless rock & roll mission statement that renders irrelevant all memories of Bill Haley and, hell, some memories of Elvis. For six minutes (spread over two sides of a 45), after one of the most distinctive and beautiful intros in all recorded music, Charles travels farther afield from his conventional background than ever, leading his band and singers in a reenactment of -- alarmingly enough -- an on-stage improvisation that begins as a lively and half-formed blues then blasts off into some heaven of shapeless fury, periodically breaking the tension for a few moments of call-and-response orgasm noises (the ultimate fusion of secular and sacred) followed by, of course, "you made me feel so good." This is one of the first rock & roll records, along with Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange," that can convincingly be called avant garde. It was also, bemusingly enough, his first crossover pop hit, reaching a remarkable #6. Such a strange record affecting such a wide swath of people seems surprising until you remember all those years Charles spent playing in clubs, learning what hit people hardest and in the greatest numbers. It was, indeed, the ecstatic response of the crowd to the set-closing improvisation that led "What'd I Say" to be recorded -- a true populist accomplishment.

Ray Charles jumped to a new label, ABC, in 1960 and took the lessons of "What'd I Say" with him. Putting aside for a moment that he managed a top ten hit with an instrumental as chaotic as "One Mint Julep" and a nightclub tune as bare and stark as "Them That Got," he scored a #1 hit with one of the most ruthless call-and-response tunes ever recorded, an enlivening of a 1960 obscurity called "Hit the Road Jack," brief and head-spinning -- Charles doesn't provide himself with the hook, only the enthusiastically embittered verses and brilliantly performed one-liners like "you don't mean that, and the record's power and brevity seem designed to leave destruction in their wake. The hits continued to spawn after that with increasingly unusual, adventurous material -- "Unchain My Heart," forecasting Marvin Gaye's late '60s singles, is a nearly atonal expression of pain, a refining of the pop-blues fusion. "At the Club," despite its frivolous plot, is nasty spoken-word noir that expertly irons out the kinks in the earlier wet-streets number "I've Got News for You"; both tunes are sumptuous yet disquieting, funny yet broken ("you phoned me you'd be late / cause you took the wrong express").

"Don't Set Me Free," a minor hit in 1963, encapsulates the high drama evident in so many of these records, but by this point Charles' greatest asset had become his increasingly expressive singing, which inflicts a faraway look in the listener's eyes on "No One," "Crying Time" and the soul deconstruction of "You Are My Sunshine." In the '60s, the great lesson of Ray Charles' work starting with the great Modern Sounds in Country & Western music was, indeed, the power in the straightforward -- just after he essentially proved the opposite. The schmaltz on his emotional later records is schmaltz indeed, but it's also undeniably affecting, direct, immersive. Sentimentality exists for a reason, after all, especially when it's tackled with the intelligence and grace of as brilliant a singer as Ray Charles. These songs mean to make you cry, and they're more than capable.

This compilation sinks toward the end into Charles' '70s and '80s work, mostly exercises in country nostalgia that don't really work unless your appreciation of his vocals far outpaces your resistance to bland, Huey Lewis-like arrangements that cop out by refusing to go all the way with their Beautiful Music persuasions or to let Charles sit unaccompanied; sadly, most of the records he made in the last three decades of his life have aged poorly and aren't much use now, which is a pity because as a singer and piano player he never really lost his grip. Luckily, Ultimate sticks to a few token selections (though their choices are so awful one wonders if there might have been better options lurking someplace), and it's handy to be reminded of Charles' now almost completely forgotten second career as a consistent minor hitmaker on country music stations.

Plus we don't get to that point before receiving not just an instance of Charles' raw power as a singer elevated to surprising patriotic effect on a version of "America the Beautiful" that doesn't overreach, but two of his absolute masterpieces from the '60s. First is "Let's Go Get Stoned," a huge R&B hit that did nothing on pop radio and was really the last hurrah of Ray Charles the ceaseless innovator. It's the point when his ability to put the full scope and magnitude of pain in his music is matched up at last with the spare, gut-wrenching arrangements of his '50s records, tremendous backup singing and all, and the pained wit of his crossover hits. Beautifully composed by Ashford & Simpson with Josephine Armstead, it's everything great, provocative, and forbidden about Ray Charles in one recording.

But best of all, I suppose, is the 1968 rendition of the Beatles' "Yesterday." The Paul McCartney composition is really quite brilliant, its melody and lyrics both striking, but the original recording is deeply flawed -- the string arrangement is poor and hollow, and McCartney's rote recitation of the vocal is absent of any convincing pain. That's what Ray Charles brings in, and his agonized revision runs circles around the Beatles', the way that the Beatles themselves so often redefined and reshaped the songs they covered. "Yesterday" is for the first time not just an intellectually impressive pop song but a raw and wrenching, believable document of the very sorrow its lyrics purport to express. Charles' frayed voice has the sort of impact any singer should long for -- and he knows the effect he's having. He also knows that he's making Paul Mccartney's day by doing this; it's a tip of the hat across an ocean, because each performer knew more than anyone in his audience how hard the other had worked, day and night, for his great success.

[SEE ALSO:]
Genius + Soul = Jazz (1961)
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)

The Walkmen: Bows + Arrows (2004)

(Record Collection)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Shortly after I returned to Heaven to deliver an updated verdict on it, my longtime friend Brian texted me to inform me he'd just discovered the album and had flipped for it, calling it the Walkmen's best since Bows and Arrows. I must admit that it has its melodic tangents that have stuck with me strongly in the last few days, and my impression of it has improved since its initial release, but what struck me about Brian's comment was how differently his impressions of the Walkmen are from mine. For I have felt that their career was leading to the double-header of You & Me and Lisbon, a peak of unfiltered, masterful rock & roll beauty. Though Bows + Arrows had been my introduction to the band -- and, indeed, to modern indie rock -- I suddenly realized that I hadn't spent any significant amount of time with it in several years.

The Walkmen have always adored linguistic clichés. "What happened to you?" "We're counting on you." "What's in it for me?" "We can't be beat." "Woe is me." They're something that creates an instant rapport, something to toy with, but in my mind all these years the band had only begun to concentrate on a give-and-take audience relationship in the hopeful, open-armed sounds they delivered in the late 2000s. It's not that I'd forgotten the romantic reveal on "What's in It for Me?" but just that it had lingered in my memory as something else, something detached and closed-off and brooding. With the perspective of the intervening years, though, I now see that everything goes back to Bows + Arrows, that it's no outlier at all -- it's just a youthful expression of the same emotions that would end up delivering the band's best recordings. Youth provides, of course, a climactic heft that an older band could never manage, which is one reason why this remains their signature record in the eyes and ears of most folks. But they're already suggesting sweet domesticity on the tirelessly pretty "138th Street": "take a wife and start a life, it won't be long."

I discovered the Walkmen in the very 2004 manner of a burned CDR from a fellow deli clerk, at a time when my awareness of new music had reached what remains its all-time nadir. The radio was gone and I had not yet adjusted to the methods of discovery and digestion that would soon fill the years between Napster and Spotify. Dustin, the friend who made me the CD, was consumed and validated by "The Rat," as I soon would be. There are other slamming "rock" songs on this actually quite sad and quiet album, which contribute to its legend and memory as a brash and attitude-filled production hunting undeniably for Strokes-ish immediacy, but even they shimmer ("The North Pole") or scatter ("Thinking of a Dream," which boasts both consuming organ and an American Breed drumbeat cop). The touchstone here, I knew immediately, was Marquee Moon, a record I unreservedly adored and found infinite solace in at that time -- so I responded well to Bows + Arrows, but to none of it so much as "The Rat," which entirely orients and balances the remainder of the LP. It was like some sort of knock down into a puddle, and I still believe it to be the finest rock song of its decade.

Because you can hear the future and the past in the pure hazy distortion of "No Christmas While I'm Talking," the drunkenness of "My Old Man," but it's no big thing to express youthful introspection in those terms. "The Rat" is a remarkable single because it delivers apprehension and alienation as a violent and desolate force without either anger or self-pity; it's a black hole of something akin to empathy, so even as it sounds nothing like Television, who'd have balked at the idea of providing such a forgiving climax, it does their thematic concerns proud. The harshness of its rapid-fire assault, the strangely redemptive arrangement, the half-hearted expressions of broken longing that almost but not quite can be bothered to get upset ("I know, we've been through this before") are all aspects of its primal appeal.

But the thing Dustin and I obssessed over, at a time when every other piece of music we conversed about dated from the early '80s at the latest, was the bridge, which musically is just a mild break from the catharsis, but vocally and lyrically, Hamilton Leithauser delivers the haunting thesis: "When I used to go out I would know everyone that I saw. Now I go out alone, if I go out at all." I was twenty then, and without knowing what the future would hold, I somehow knew this was a universal biography of my kind. As much as "Venus" and "Marquee Moon" might have celebrated the dizzy familiarity of a city, "The Rat" sees dread and despair in the same -- yet there's still a hint of beauty and joy to be found, but it's an Eyes Wide Shut or Sweet Smell of Success New York, not a Woody Allen New York. This ain't the Mudd Club or CBGB's; I ain't got time for that now.

"The Rat" is only the second cut on Bows + Arrows. I think it was months before I stopped repeating it long enough to move on. I eventually found much to love in the oblique beauty of the title track, the hungover piano of "Hang On, Siobhan," in which Hamilton's ache predicts his next eight years of gorgeous singing ("we promised to keep it between you and me," he snarls adoringly). And while it's handily defeated by "In the New Year" in the grand context of Walkmen songs about December 31, "New Year's Eve" is a simple, gorgeous jewel, the occasional explosion of joy already driving the Walkmen. That's certainly illustrated by the other climactic track here, the immortal "Little House of Savages," which when I put it on yesterday evening drove home to me how much, as good as Heaven is, it can't stand up to this relentless, brutal younger band. After all these years I can't decide if the narrative of someone waiting for you to come home is as romantic as my heart tells me or as menacing and potentially lethal as my cynical impulse does, but the best corroborative evidence that it's both -- a doomed love affair, more than likely -- is the almost conservative romanticism and pragmatic intelligence illustrated by the three most recent Walkmen records. And that's what I love about them, what I suspect I was hearing from the start. Because it's scary and sad, and you're a bastard for doing this, but there's also some resigned what-a-world loveliness to all of it, isn't there?

I was a Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry geek; the only currently running band I cared about in 2004 was Yo La Tengo, and really I was more interested in movies then anyway. "Little House of Savages" would have more relevance for me than I could've known later in the year, and years hence so would that haunting refrain in "The Rat," but what hooked me was that this was a rock band from New York City (by way of Washington) and they were alive, new that moment, and here I was receiving these missives and caring about, loving them. (I could have seen them at a tiny club called the Soapbox that very week -- more foreshadowing -- but didn't, because I was too scared to go out on my own; I wouldn't get to see them until six years later, but it was worth the wait.) It was a moment of genuine evolution and stabbed much of my skepticism about "new bands" in the heart. I couldn't really explain why this sound connected so instantly and intimately with me, why I heard the wet city streets of Marquee Moon in the Walkmen's songs, don't know why they sound like they should be bigger than life to me and aren't (they still open for younger, lesser bands after all these years), but whatever. It's to my delight that it's all still true, that I'd forgotten how it was all already there back then. As the song goes, the more we talk, the less we understand.

[SEE ALSO:]
Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2004)
You & Me (2008)
Lisbon (2010)
Heaven (2012)

The Walkmen: Heaven (2012)

(Fat Possum)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my Metro Times review.

This is right on the edge of being just "recommended" but I bumped it up because I truly feel that if a change so minor as the songs being in a different order had been made, I wouldn't have been so underwhelmed -- and after spending the summer with the thing, I find myself reaching for it with considerable affection. More specific justification follows.

Cons: sounds like a series of leftovers, sounds vaguely unfinished (it appeared so suspiciously fast!), a little treacly in areas (though I really love "Song for Leigh" which is the one everyone's singled out). Has a bit of an early U2 thing going? Or Dire Straits or uh, Springsteen. Sounds really weak and nimble when played against basically any of their prior canonical albums -- even A Hundred Miles Off, which I stand by as a mystifying underrated record -- especially so soon after Lisbon. Pacing is bizarre, sounds like someone reversed it at the factory or something.

Pros: guitars have never sounded better. Band has never sounded better. Hamilton has never sounded better. The songs are solid. And when I think about it, it's the mesmerizing sound that I love about the Walkmen and I dig this album for the sheer fact of adding more and increasingly adventurous and weirdly arranged tunes (they've discovered 1950s country, it seems) to their canon. Sounds absolutely wonderful while driving at night. Has a bit of an early U2 thing going? Or uh, Van Morrison circa Tupelo Honey. The songs with "love" in the title are two of the best songs with "love" in the title that I've heard lately.

[SEE ALSO:]
Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2002)
You & Me (2008)
Lisbon (2010)

Amos Milburn: Bad Bad Whiskey (1947-55)

(Vanilla Digital)

RECOMMENDED

The low-key career of the late pianist Amos Milburn is an important link in the rock & roll narrative because it's one of the bodies of work that sits in a nexus point -- encyclopedias remember him as nominally a boogie musician, but it's more accurate to consider him as one of the architects of the link between jazz and blues, of the affixing of blues song forms to musically adventurous, free-flowing jazz arrangements. In this sense, a luminary like Fats Domino owes everything to Milburn, something Domino has always been ready to acknowledge.

This brief compilation of some of Milburn's signature sides is, admittedly, more absorbing as a historical listen than as the pounding, ferocious marathon of immediacy that its excited liner notes might imply. There's no wow factor or spark of latecoming recognition. Without the context, though, the music's simply a lot of fun, and you don't have to know much about Milburn or about where boogie, jazz, or blues were sitting in the '40s to appreciate these songs, their banging piano solos, their suggestively erotic and playful lyrics ("just draw the shades and we'll play a while"), and the ageless joy in something like the killer proto-rock & roll jam "House Party Tonight."

That song along with the title track are the highlights here. The latter is a jewel; for all the swing in its rolling piano, that mischievously muttering vocal is what strikes. The same goes for the semi-sequel "Let Me Go Home Whiskey," on which Milburn mournfully announces that he's "got orders from my baby / not to come home juiced no more." There's a comic enthusiasm to even his sad songs, but one must admit that Milburn is most fun when he sounds absolutely loose. Take the perfect hop-skip of "Down the Road Apiece," a strong case made in two minutes for Milburn's importance in jump-blues, or better yet the dirty sax and proto-rap in "Sax Shack Boogie," all about "a little dance that they call the scrunch." This disc is over before you know it, but in the meantime it's a worthy education on a hotbed of influence, and the songs still cook hot and bright enough for your house party.

The Velvet Underground (1969)

(MGM)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

The first casualties had been Nico and Andy Warhol, who abandoned the Velvets for good or ill. The next one was potentially crippling -- John Cale, fed up with Lou Reed and the universe, packed his bags and viola and vanished. Without Cale, however, Reed the songwriter suddenly came of age. His biggest ally in the world of noise and experimentation was gone and now he was a tunesmith. For the Velvets' third album, he becomes his own Dylan, spinning tales and melodies with the unerring sophistication of an obvious Goffin-King-Barry-Greenwich-Holland-Dozier-Holland student. Reed had, in fact, worked in a miniature Brill Building knockoff in the years before the VU came together -- his label had refused to release "Heroin."

Even with the angelic singing of Lou and new bassist Doug Yule, the soft, delicate production, and the overwhelming melodic appeal of the songs, it is Bob Dylan who comes to mind when we hear this, for the simple reason that all ten of these compositions have a life of their own; all seem monumental, legendary, and with good reason.

The album, in truth, couldn't be sonically more different from its predecessors. You can hear some traces of it in "Sunday Morning" and "I'll Be Your Mirror," but even they had a self-imposed iconic sheen that seems long gone in these bare, literate, and almost invariably sad songs. You could call it Simon & Garfunkel with a brain and heart and libido ("Some Kinda Love"), but even that doesn't even touch the fact of the matter, which is that for all its uncharacteristic qualities, it is the same band that brought forth "Heroin" and "Venus in Furs" from the pits of foul whatever. "I'm Set Free" may be straightforward and pretty, but it marks the same desperation and fury as "Heroin." It's just a good enough song to pass on its own merits and say what it means instead of leaping into you unguarded for attention. In the same sense, "The Murder Mystery" is as rock & roll as "Tutti Frutti" -- silly and senseless but fun and teasing. All this is irrelevant, though, because these are not only the best and most personal songs Lou Reed has ever written, they are the best, most assured performances in the Velvets' catalog. The result is, perhaps inevitably, one of the best rock & roll longplayers of all time.

Lou Reed has the alluring voice, but it's Doug Yule at the helm of the seductive opener, "Candy Says." The band's touch is light as a feather, gorgeously so, as Reed reminds us of his prowess with his characters -- the way he identifies and sympathizes with them, and senses the unlikely truth that we (and he) can see ourselves in them. His effortless lyrics on this LP are his best ever, so if I don't mention it in the paragraphs to follow, keep in mind that all of these songs have brilliant, eloquent lyrics. In any case, this is a character sketch that reaches leagues beyond the world of flower power and displays a presence of mind and thought unheard of in most rock. In the end we're left with one of the most beautiful songs of its time.

"What Goes On" immediately changes the pace, breaking out the organ and guitars and giving us Lou Reed singing pure rock & roll for all of life's worth. He sings, in his first appearance on the album, as if he has just made a great discovery in his existence, as if he'd finally had a chance to tell us how he really felt, as if it doesn't really matter but he'd love to sing about it anyway. Then the solo, then the organ is louder, and he's back... and magnetic.

Sterling Morrison and Lou's Byrdsian guitar interplay on "Some Kinda Love" is only half the song's fun. Reed's witty pop-psychology lyrics about sexuality are as intelligent and amusing as you'd expect, and the man is a poet, but even as he's living in a guise of satire he presents us with a recording that finds its own way to be erotic, not explicitly but somewhere within the pulses of Maureen Tucker's bass drum and the casual slaughter of Reed's voice. "Let us now kiss the culprit" is as vital a climax in the Velvets' catalog as "My mind's split open."

Side One reaches a climax with the magnificent "Pale Blue Eyes," one of the best rock moments on record. The personal, childlike lyrics are jaw-dropping in their articulate, frenzied affection. The musical dead air hurls by the words like a train, and Reed sounds both deathly alone and of one with the face of his surroundings, the guitar playing off his emotions the way you'd imagine is ideal to every composer and rarely achieved. Musically, it couldn't be happier or more shimmering, but Reed casts a pall on the proceedings and the world soon seems to be in black and white, the beautiful notes a fragment of a funeral march.

"Jesus" is as revealtory as "Pale Blue Eyes." The challenging declaration of faith seems a genuine cry for a help without a trace of irony. The recording itself is especially evocative. Like the rest of the album, it is aided by a muffled, distant production that brings to mind an image of a band playing in an old, decaying house (Lou Reed's version was called "the closet mix" for a reason). In their awareness of the past -- the mentions of forgotten old movies, Reed's chivalrous dialect and endless array of odd characters -- the Velvet Underground have a way of reaching beyond the traces of the world and of time that rock & roll has inhabited. They nonetheless see them within the dialect and the mindset of the music they create, rendering it exempt from the curse of aging; it understands time too well to date itself.

The next two songs, "Beginning to See the Light" and "I'm Set Free," offer the greatest pleasures in the Velvet Underground's entire catalog. The former forecasts the all-knowing glory of Loaded; an arm-raising anthem of joy and freedom, it marks Lou Reed as a real charmer on vocals ("there are problems in these times, but wooo! none of them are mine!"), and the band is loud, reflective and thrilling without wearing out its welcome or betraying the introspective flavor of the record. Modeled on the Kinks' "Tired of Waiting for You," it's irresistible and addictive, with a remarkably exhilirating bridge section... and the all-time moment, "How does it feel...?"

"I'm Set Free," however, is their most fully realized production and, for me at least, their greatest and most elegant achievement. Theatrical in a Phil Spector vein, with guitars and drums that sound like reassuring answers to every unsettling question you ever needed to ask. Lou is overjoyed at the changes his life has undertaken, but carries no misconceptions about his fate. He is set free... but only to find a new illusion. It can be nothing but uplifting, however, because although Reed is unwilling to accept the truth, he breaks it open and finds life and joy in it. "I saw my head laughing / Rolling on the ground." There are few songs in the world that are so life-affirming, potentially life-changing. The Velvet Underground is not Andy Warhol's big joke or a set of leather-clad smack-snorting nogoodniks. They are an outfit of awesome power.

"That's the Story of My Life" is a trifle, but only in comparison, and it offers somber, comforting reflection of its own. "The Murder Mystery" is another story, so to speak. Earmarked almost unanimously as a failed experiment, it's anything but. Lou and Sterling spit out words rapidly and Maureen and Doug sing softly while a creeping, crawling backing track suffocates them all slowly. You may grow bitter if you sit for untold hours with your ear to the speaker attempting to find the culprit, but accepting it as a mood, as a single painterly piece of work you can't help but adore it, especially if you stay through the whole nine minutes. Like "The Gift" and the Beatles' "Revolution 9," it's that seldom-heard self-indulgent rock experiment that works perfectly and remembers to be fun. Also, the stream-of-consciousness words are a gas if you can find them.

That madness sets the stage -- the table? -- for Maureen Tucker's step up to the spotlight, the delightful, sparse, unforgettable "After Hours." With soft cabaret backup, she offers some of Reed's most personal and touching lyrics -- he still manages to be clever and she is just pure charm all the way through. It's a perfect song and probably a shoe-in as the best album closer in rock history.

You will carry all of these wonderful songs with you for the rest of your life. I don't know what else I can say, but it really doesn't get any better than this.

[Originally posted in a state of infinite naivete in 2004.]

[SEE ALSO:]
The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
White Light / White Heat (1968)