My Back Pages, Vol. 10: The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

Today we take a look at the seminal debut from The Velvet Underground. Whether you know it for its iconic Andy Warhol-designed cover, its revolutionarily dark lyricism, or its astonishingly ahead-of-its-time protopunk sound, The Velvet Underground & Nico is a veritable classic in every sense of the word. This piece also functions as a tribute to Mr. Lou Reed, ringleader of The Velvet Underground for four albums before embarking on a decades-long solo career. Reed died a little over a month ago. Listen along with our Rdio playlist, and please jump in and share your thoughts on this fantastic record.

Chris: On October 27th of this year Lou Reed passed away peacefully in his home on Long Island at the age of 71. The official cause of death was liver failure.

It was a Sunday morning.

Lou Reed made countless contributions to the legacy of popular music—as well as not-so-popular music—but he will be immortalized largely for the work he did on The Velvet Underground & Nico, the group's debut album. Recorded in 1966 and released in 1967, the record is the definition of "ahead of its time." Those two years were certainly incredibly fertile ones for rock 'n roll, but The Velvet Underground were going in a completely different direction than their innovative peers. VU started recording their debut the same month The Beach Boys wrapped up the sessions for Pet Sounds out in California, and a solid eight months before The Beatles went into the studio in London to begin recording Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

But unlike the sunny and intricately crafted psychedelic pop those two groups came up with, The Velvet Underground & Nico is a harsh, dark, bleak head trip of a record. And listen up kids of AbsolutePunk.net, because it is truly the first stone in the foundation of punk rock. Ten years before the likes of the Sex Pistols, The Clash and the Ramones would make a splash on both sides of the Atlantic, Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground made a record that stripped rock 'n roll down to its leanest and meanest components and presented a menacing, sneering countenance that was quite the foil to the acid-wrought "we are all one" sentiments being peddled by the mainstream greats of rock 'n roll at the time. Sound familiar? It should.

I discovered The Velvet Underground in a most unusual fashion. In the liner notes for the Ramones compilation Loud Fast Ramones: Their Toughest Hits, which someone gave me as a fifteenth birthday present, it mentions that back in 1976 some boneheaded music critic referred to the Ramones as potentially "the greatest singles band since The Velvet Underground," which obviously is a really, really dumb thing to write as pretty much every single released by VU was a total commercial flop. But the statement caught my attention and I got my hands on a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico. I didn't really understand the album then, and I don't really claim to now, but I have come to fall in love with its bizarre breed of magic, and in the wake of Reed's passing it's slowly gaining a new meaning for me.

The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of those records about which absolutely everything worth saying has already been said approximately forty-seven times, but bear with me momentarily while I gush. Reed said that his goal when he began writing songs was to write the "Great American Novel" in the form of an album and that's not too far off from what he did with VU's debut. I've never spent more than six hours in New York City and I certainly have no idea what it was like it all its unsanitized glory in the mid-60s, but the characters Reed depicts or inhabits on this album are so vivid and riveting that I feel like I have some understanding of the gritty city that birthed the record.

We've all heard it before but it bears repeating: lyrically what Reed did on this album was totally fucking revolutionary. I'm sorry to keep going back to the comparisons to The Beatles, but while John Lennon was writing couplets like "Picture yourself in a boat on a river / With tangerine trees and marmalade skies," Lou Reed was writing stuff like this: "Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man / When I put a spike into my vein / And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same / When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' son." His straight-faced depictions of drug use, addiction, sexual deviancy and everything in between are arresting and haunting in the most perfect way, and backed with squalls of feedback such as on "Heroin" it sounds like something from the most captivating nightmare you've never had.

But the most haunting and visceral song on the record interestingly enough is also the most reserved. "Sunday Morning," the album's opening song, is quite simply the most beautiful ode to the painful "morning after" ever recorded. And lines like "Early dawning, sunday morning / It's just the wasted years so close behind" particularly send a chill down my spine in wake of Reed's death. I can't get over the fact that he actually passed away on a cold and somber Sunday morning just like the song. It just seems too perfect, like it was always fated to end that way.

Lou Reed gave us something truly special with The Velvet Underground & Nico, and while it may seem unfair for me to not have mentioned John Cale or Nico at all in this piece, Reed is the one who cast the longest shadow onto the history books of rock 'n roll. Even if he had never recorded another note after VU's debut his influence would still be immense. As Brian Eno said about the record, it may not have sold very well when it was initially released, but it seems like everyone who bought a copy of the album started a band. One doesn't have to venture too far into any sector of the rock 'n roll world since 1967 to verify the veracity of that statement: The Velvet Underground didn't start something with this album so much as they started everything.

Craig: When Rolling Stone ranked The Velvet Underground & Nico as the thirteenth greatest record of all time in 2003, the publication called it "the most prophetic rock album ever made." Say what you want about the publication (I certainly have), but I’ve always loved that description. Very often when people talk about this record, they (like Chris) bring up Reed’s gritty lyrics, decadent and depraved novellas of drug abuse ("Heroin"), prostitution ("Femme Fatale"), and sadomasochism ("Venus in Furs”) inspired by the equally hard-hitting poetry of Allen Ginsberg and other literary figures whom Reed admired during his time as an English major. For me, though, this album has always been more remarkable for its seemingly limitless ability to distill the trends of the past 50 years of rock 'n roll into 50 minutes of music.

Today, an album coming out and capturing the last 50 years of music would be remarkable in and of itself, simply considering just how many genres and sounds have risen and fallen in that time. For an album that came out in 1967 to still sound this vital and current and retroactively referential—even of sounds that hadn’t been invented on the rock music landscape when it was released—well...that shouldn’t be possible, right? And yet, orchestrator John Cale, singer/songwriter Lou Reed, German vocalist Nico, and the rest of the Velvet Underground team, they somehow did it on their first fucking record.

Indeed, if one were to listen to The Velvet Underground & Nico with no reference point, no knowledge of the band, and no idea who Lou Reed or John Cale or Nico even were or are, I would imagine they would have a difficult time placing it in a musical context. Sure, there are some clear 1960s sounds here—Reed and Cale sound like they are directly referencing Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited on bluesier numbers like "I’m Waiting For My Man" or "Run Run Run," while Nico’s feminine vocals and the way they lilt on psychedelic pop offerings like "All Tomorrow’s Parties" absolutely sound like something out of the Woodstock age. There’s also "There She Goes," which was very likely built from the template of the catchiest numbers from the first Beatles record, from "I Saw Her Standing There" to "Twist and Shout."

But there’s so much else going on here, too. The dirty (and dirt cheap) production style and the spontaneous nature of the orchestrations—the jarring tempo shifts and thrilling crescendos of the album’s definitive track, "Heroin," or the seemingly improvised electric guitar work of "All Tomorrow’s Parties"—feel like forebears of a 1980s punk sound; Nico’s "Femme Fatale" sounds like the androgynous glam-pop or goth rock of the 1980s. "Heroin" could also be seen as an early prototype for math rock, while the cacophony of album closer, "European Son," gave plenty of bands the license they needed to employ noise and scuzz for an entirely different form of expression. Cue grunge, noise rock, punk (again), avante garde guitar styles, and probably every other genre where musicians realized they didn’t have to make pleasant, harmonious sounds in order to gain respect. Elsewhere, Reed’s jangly guitar sounds and cryptic lyrics presaged the ingredients that R.E.M. would use to single-handedly found indie rock a decade and a half later (on similarly timeless albums like Murmur and Reckoning), while some of R.E.M.’s later, darker material can even be traced back to the horror film thrum of "Venus in Furs."

Put simply, there’s an awful lot to digest here, and in the wake of Lou Reed’s passing, I’ve found myself returning to this record with renewed vigor and attention to detail. This album has been in my collection for years, and I’ve always respected it. The music is so dynamic and ferocious and fascinating; the Warhol cover is an all-time favorite; when my brother has played this record on vinyl, it’s made me want to be a die-hard Velvet Underground fan. Until recently though, I don’t think I quite had the palette to appreciate the vast number of sounds going on here. That’s a shame, considering the fact that I’m now part of a camp that has only really come to appreciate Lou Reed posthumously. But judging from how many artists who have so obviously built their own art from Reed’s template—so perfectly realized on his first time at-bat—it’s safe to say that the man’s legacy will never fade from the rock 'n roll tapestry.

Foxygen - We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Foxygen - We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Jagjaguwar, 2013
8.0/10

The first time I pushed play on We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic--the second full-length record from California duo Foxygen--and opening cut “In the Darkness” came cascading out of my speakers, I had to double check my iTunes to make sure I was listening to the right album. The sounds I was hearing--a wonky piano, a booming bass, a softly shimmering electric guitar, a chorus of distant back-up vocals, Sam France’s Lennon-esque croon, and some kind of vaudevillian trumpet roll--all of them told through a layer of 1960s vinyl distortion, instantly coalesced like some long-lost Beatles b-side. I felt like I’d just thrown on an alternate universe’s version of Sgt. Pepper (or maybe Magical Mystery Tour...), and it almost baffled me how perfectly France, band partner Jonathan Rado, and producer Richard Smith were able to capture that late-era, experimental Beatles sound. Indeed, “In the Darkness” is a thing to behold as an opener, a timeless slice of psychedelic rock, perfectly balanced between meticulous studio arrangement and tripped-out spontaneity, between avant-garde textures and pop sensibilities. I thought I was in for an album full of throwback Beatles imitation, and I could hardly have been more pleased.

But if there’s one thing Foxygen teach listeners throughout We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, it’s that we shouldn’t make ourselves comfortable with one specific sonic niche. As early as “No Destruction,” the record’s second track, things shift. France drops Lennon, opting instead for the disorienting drawl Lou Reed showed off so memorably on 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. And before the song is even over, things shift again: France’s Reed impression morphs into rambunctious Bob Dylan gravel, the song traveling with him. Once a steady bass/piano/organ groover, “No Destruction” doubles down on its percussion elements and charges forward, France’s voice sliding and straining between spoken word and melody like he’s ready to bust into a well-timed cover of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

And those two songs are, quite literally, just the tip of the iceberg of musical reference that Foxygen scales throughout We Are. There’s the Elvis tribute of “On Blue Mountain,” where France directly quotes the melodic refrain from “Suspicious Minds” a numerous junctures; there’s the hazy California pop of “San Francisco,” which references a signature Tony Bennett song (you know, the one where he leaves his heart there), even while grounding itself more in classic, A.M. radio doo-wop or modern indie pop than with love-struck jazz standards; and the riotous title track sounds like it should have been on Exile on Main St., its scratchy production values and France’s unhinged vocal style perfectly distilling the spirit of rock music’s glory days for a new generation.

Somehow though, Foxygen manage to make their blatantly obvious references sound innovative and fresh within their wider musical context. A big reason for that--though certainly not the only one--is the way France and Rado are able to construct unusual, shape-shifting song structures with astounding ease. Revisit “On Blue Mountain,” which begins in organ-drenched Rolling Stones territory (think “Shine a Light”), accelerates towards Elvis appropriation, and then alternately pumps the brakes and slams the on the gas throughout the rest of its nearly six-minute running time. When the song finally reaches its climax--a smooth Clapton-esque guitar solo, surrounded by a cloud of noise and accented by France’s Jagger-like snarls--lsteners will almost have forgotten where they started. No less loose in construction is album stand-out “Shuggie,” a power-pop gem whose late-song funk-breakdown is legitimately impossible to resist.

A lot of artists write their own stories by the light of their record collections, and why not? We all love making playlists and mixtapes, soundtracking our day-to-day lives while hoping to project our musical preferences onto friends, family, and significant others. What Foxygen have done here is ultimately just an extension of that tendency. And they aren’t the first artists to do so, by any means: The Gaslight Anthem, for example, have saw a meteoric rise within this very scene, largely because of their ability to appropriate pieces of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Pearl Jam, and old soul records into their own distinct sound. Albums like We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, however, are a rarer manifestation of this influence-collecting phenomenon. France and Rado show as much care for reference and tribute here, for capturing a distinct 60s and 70s mood, as they do for more conventional aspects of songwriting, to the point where We Are essentially becomes a treasure hunt for musical familiarities.

In lesser hands, such an intense focus on homage might have come across as a gimmick, or turned the finished product into little more than a glorified cover album. Foxygen pull it off though, and most of the credit for that triumph has to be pointed towards France’s chameleonic vocal ability. But if Jagger, Dylan, Reed, and Lennon are the singer’s main points of reference, they are hardly where the musical palette leaves off. Shades of Bowie’s trademark glam-rock, The Band’s rootsy Americana, The Kinks’ punked-up Brit-pop, and even the legendary L.A. “Mellow Mafia” sound, creep in around the fringes, while other listeners will catch everything from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Byrds to Jimi Hendrix. And as France adopts a faux-Sinatra croon over the album’s final moments, things are at last brought back around to this century, his vocal quiver and articulation recalling hues of Brandon Flowers. All of this may or may not have been explicitly intended when Foxygen sat down to write We Are, but the impact is the same: the record is a jukebox boiled down to its greatest hits, a playground romp through the back-pages of pop music history, and in this case, the journey is well worth taking. The album title may call them the “ambassadors of peace and magic,” but the music inside tells a different tale: these guys are the 21st century ambassadors of classic rock ‘n’ roll, and it's damn nice having them around.

The Killers - Battle Born

The Killers - Battle Born

Island Records, 2012

4.5 stars

Brandon Flowers is a machine. Since The Killers’ debut LP Hot Fuss exploded back in 2004, he’s released a new album every two years like clockwork, always in the fall, and always preceded by an anthemic lead-off single. It’s worked well: the first two are modern classics, Hot Fuss a pristine example of what radio-rock should sound like and Sam’s Town a stunning work of Springsteen-esque heartland rock and towering hubris. Things got a little more confusing on album number three, 2008’s Day & Age, which tried to blend the Vegas-centered new wave of Fuss with the arena-sweep of its follow-up, to mixed results. Looking back, Day & Age was nowhere near the disaster that many listeners made it out to be, but it was unquestionably the weakest album Flowers and company had put out. Even worse, its scatterbrained musical styling and bizarre left-turns suggested that either the band was getting restless with their image, exhausted from the nonstop, marathon schedule they had been operating on since they stumbled upon fame, or just running out of ideas. Most of them needed a break, but Flowers kept on trucking: he made a masterful solo album called Flamingo in 2010, a record that went back to the Vegas roots of the first album and maintained the epic scope of Sam’s Town, but drenched them both in Americana textures.

For those of us who wondered what Flamingo would have sounded like with the full force of The Killers behind it, the question is ostensibly answered with Battle Born. Largely, the songs here have the same wandering, soul-searching tendencies that developed on Flowers’ last two albums, but the style is refined. Take the meandering “Heart of a Girl,” which channels The Velvet Underground with a bass-heavy opening, ringing keys at the break, and Flowers’ best Lou Reed impression. “A Matter of Time” kicks off as a retread of Flamingo’s “Jilted Lovers and Broken Hearts” before exploding into a cinematic rocker that could easily have been on Sam’s Town. “When we first met, headstrong and filled with doubt/Made just enough hustling tables that summer to take you out/I was fallin’ back on forever when you told me about your heart/You laid it on the line,” Flowers belts out halfway through. It’s a song rife with the euphoria of first love, but it’s also a shape-shifter, and as the tension builds throughout, we feel the relationship evaporate before our eyes. By the time Flowers reaches the “wreckage of broken dreams and burned out halos” waiting for him in the final lines, everything has changed.

Thematic connections begin to form between the songs on Battle Born as one delves further into them. The rousing “Miss Atomic Bomb” reflects on the naivety of the characters in “A Matter of Time” (“You were standing with your girlfriends in the street/Fallin’ back on forever, I wonder what you came to be,” Flowers sings at the outset), but also plays as a sequel (or rather, prequel) of sorts to “Mr. Brightside.” “I was new in town, the boy with the eager eyes,” he states in the first verse, calling back to the hit that made him a rock star. We already know that the girl in the story ends up cheating, but “Miss Atomic Bomb” examines the narrative on a more personal and nostalgic level. The song builds to a multi-tracked vocal climax, Flowers baring his soul in a maze of anguish accentuated perfectly by the song’s tumultuous and bombastic musical structure. It’s the closest the band has come to the sound and feel of Hot Fuss in years, and for many, that will be the biggest selling point of Battle Born. The same can be said for the synthy 80s pop of “Deadlines and Commitments,” a dark spiral of song which serves as the perfect bridge between the album’s two thematic pillars, or “The Rising Tide,” which gives Dave Keuning a roaring and disorienting solo: this is the band people fell in love with eight years ago.

But while musical and thematic elements from both Hot Fuss and Flamingo are revisited here, Bruce Springsteen is clearly still Flowers’ go-to musical influence. He’s all over these songs, whether we’re talking about the two aforementioned narratives of young love or the skyscraping lead single “Runaways.” Perhaps it’s not so surprising for a band that has made their name on larger-than-life chart toppers, but “Runaways” is arguably the best song you will hear on the radio airwaves this year. This is the “When We Were Young,” the “Read My Mind”; in Boss terms, the lyricism falls someone between “Born to Run” (“Let’s take a chance baby we can’t lose”) and “The River” (“There's a picture of us on our wedding day/I recognize the girl but I can't settle in these walls”), but the ultimate impact is universal either way. Once the explosive third verse crackles through the speakers, all influences and preconceptions are rendered moot by the overwhelming power of the Herculean arrangement; a lot of bands attempt the arena-sized anthem, but almost nobody does them better than this.

Speaking of arena-filling choruses, album-highlight “Here With Me” has a mammoth one. It’s a shameless 80s-style power ballad, more reminiscent of Journey or Foreigner than Springsteen or U2, but Flowers pulls it off. Piano chords and reverb-drenched vocals serve as the commencement, a fitting kick-off for a tune that builds into a modern-day cigarette lighter love song. “I don’t want your picture on my cell phone/I want you here with me,” Flowers proclaims on the chorus, wearing the potentially hokey line proudly and somehow transforming it into a transcendent battle cry. That’s the thing about Flowers: for all of his egotistical remarks and conflict-inciting interactions with other bands, you never doubt his conviction. He has the voice, the charisma, and the searing emotional audacity to give an epic classic rock record (which is essentially what Battle Born builds into) its gravitational pull, and while the contributions from his band are very obviously instrumental here, it’s his heart-and-soul dedication to these songs that ultimately makes them work.

It’s fitting that Battle Born closes with its title track. From the resounding guitar hits (culled directly from The Who's “Baba O'Riley”) to the “Bohemian Rhapsody”-flavored back-up vocals, all the way to a verse that apes Woodie Guthrie’s “The Land is Your Land,” “Battle Born” is one hell of a climax. When the song finally shatters into a gospel-flavored coda, a minute and a half from its conclusion, it’s hard for me not to think of Battle Born as the greatest record these guys have ever made. Its certainly the most cohesive – an album about the euphoric innocence and the crushing heartbreak of young love, an album about the inequities of the American dream, but also one that, like Springsteen’s best, finds hope within the darkness in the end. Battle Born is the kind of rock ‘n’ roll record that almost nobody makes anymore: it’s bombastic and excessive and oversized, but it’s also a grand and universal statement, a master class of album structure and sequencing, and a culmination of everything Brandon Flowers and The Killers have done up to this point. There will always be detractors, but to me, The Killers are the best band in the mainstream right now, and this record deserves to be celebrated. Just make sure you play it loud.