Review Summary: Looks great on paper, but there is too much musical masturbation getting in the way of actual substance.
An unbelievably influential record, this one. Before 1968, concepts like "noise" and "feedback" were mostly reserved to the likes of the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience and even then, restricted as "garnish" to the main dishes. The rest of the music world (as well as the Velvets circa 1967) was enamored in its "beauty quest", painfully oblivious of the possibilities of "ugliness". Add to that the extravagant, dissonant nature of the closing epic and you have an album that defied expectations, rules and time...
The greatest success of the album lies in its atmosphere; forget all about their debut, for this release couldn’t contrast its predecessor in a more obvious way. If
Nico was, for the most part, drenched in a world-weary, quirky beauty and had a couple garage rockers and “atonal” jams for variety, this release revels in its ugliness. Truly, the insanely distorted guitars here could make Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap proud, as they completely envelop the listener in a murky, misty sonic environment. Formally, the record is poorly produced; the drums are thin and often inaudible, the vocals usually buried in the mix, the playing amateurish and sloppy, but in small doses the approach on this album reaches for the primal instincts and, even if not deeply, hits its target.
Another interesting aspect has to be the lyrics. Whether Lou Reed is dealing with sexual orgies, operations, drug use, or long-distance relationship problems, the descriptions are usually superbly detailed, hilarious and intriguing to observe. After all, he wasn’t (unjustly I might add) named a Dylan imitator for nothing. The following verse speaks for its self:
”Ah, you shouldn't do that
Don't you know you'll hit the carpet
Don't you know you'll mess the carpet
And by the way you've got a dollar”
Thus, any album with these qualities is destined to have a classic or two under its belt; the title track is deservedly lauded for its proto-punk influence, but I’d be hard pressed to call it a punk number per se. The guitars crawl under the thumping bass line and the mostly inanimate drums, giving the song a lazy, laid-back tone than a “burn the house down” vibe; not to mention that the out-of-tune-but-still-charming harmonies and the buried piano lines make it more of a perverted update on some early Stones tune than some fiery punk extravaganza. However,
Lady Godiva’s Operation is not any less of a classic itself; featuring a lulling oriental melody over the usual sonic chaos, this one paints itself as a noisier remake of
I’ll Be Your Mirror and excels at its quest.
This is where it goes downhill, though; despite its articulate storytelling,
The Gift fails to become anything more than a musically enhanced e-book. The instrumentation is the usual “let’s strum three chords and add some solos afterwards” method, serving more as a backdrop for Cale's narration, but the idea of eschewing melody for spoken narration is only worthy on a theoretical level.
Perhaps the major defect is the closing
Sister Ray. Of course, it has legions of devotees around the world, but it seems more like a lab experiment than an actual art piece. There are many points of view from which one can judge the song and in all of them, it fails to deliver; as a song, it is melodically average and stale. As a jam, it is painfully one-note and lacking in different sections and variations of the theme. The tempo rises slightly at some point, the organ does it best to spice things up and guitar solos creep in randomly, but even these factors cannot save the song from utter tedium; they don’t even matter. Finally, when looking at what one can gain emotionally, there is nothing to find on a robotic and expressionless escapade that is perfectly happy under its “experimental” tag, but rarely, if ever, says anything substantial.
Unfortunately, the description about the emotional response of
Sister Ray applies to everything here. Even the two classics are raw and visceral only superficially, unable to reach primal emotions on a deep level. The whole record sounds like an exercise in style, but with too few musical ideas to make the exercise worthwhile. Mind you, I don’t judge the record for its ugly nature. This was the obvious aim; to make a musical statement that would show the world that beauty is not the only goal when making music. What they actually did, however, was to show that feedback and noise alone will not transform lackluster songwriting and sparse musical ideas into a masterpiece.
