The Velvet Underground - Velvet Underground (CD)

The Velvets go melodic!

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Jul 13, 2001

After the raw avant garde rock of their debut, and the furious noise of WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT, John Cale was replaced with Doug Yule and Lou Reed began to take the band in a more melodic direction. Not that this entailed a more commercial sound as t...he band remained on the borders of the Top 200 - Reed never sold out as frontman in the Velvet Underground, his creative vision intact. The only thing that changed was the sound.This is mostly melancholy music, slow, quiet, stripped down, the kind of thing you might play at night. But it's never boring as the music is just too beautiful and the lyrics too striking to be that. There are some quality rock'n'roll tunes on the record. I especially enjoyed the machine-gun rhythm guitar of WHAT GOES ON, which employs the effective use of repetition of Reed and Cale's earlier work, with a simple hammond organ pattern and asimple bass line and just the snare drum as percussion to create a great song. BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT is a fast rock song, too, predating the next album LOADED in using the acoustic guitar to create the rhythm for a fast song. SOME KINDA LOVE is another upbeat and humorous song. But the slow songs are simply divine, with toned down, almost blues- style lead guitar over the sparsest of rhythmic background. CANDY SAYS, JESUS, and I'M SET FREE are proof of this. PALE BLUE EYES has some touching lyrics and a simple but most soothing Sterling Morrision guitar solo in the middle. The up-tempo AFTER HOURS also features Moe Tucker's wasted, off-key debut lead vocal - nonetheless it is a very impressive performance that fits the style of the music.The only song which stops me from giving this album 5 stars is THE MURDER MYSTERY which I felt was an attempt to move back to a more avant garde direction. But without the gritty production (and probably John Cale) of the Velvet's first two albums the song here just sounds like a discordant mess without the crashing volume and feedback to back the music up. There are not even any lyrics to speak of on THE MURDER MYSTERY - in parts the band mutter and sing tunelessly different parts over the top of each other and at different times. I didn't like this song at all, and at 8 minutes it takes up about a fifth of the whole record!!!But apart from this THE VELVET UNDERGROUND is a fine, though often sad, album that emphasises a band going in a more tuneful direction under the increasing control of Lou Reed. I might even add that people who hated the first two records might like this one if they have any love of original, melodic sixties rock... Read more Less