1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 112. The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat (1968)

 

No longer attached to Nico or Andy Warhol, the Velvets are free to create an album with a much more grungy sound throughout. Having gone through so many prior albums, I can see how the tracks on here take elements from folk (the repeating musical motif with storytelling overlaid) and jazz (free-form improvisation away from the main motif), but rather than clean-sounding nylon-stringed acoustic guitar or brushed drums and double bass, here the music of the tracks is fuzzed and distorted to within an inch of its life, feedback screams, and the backing is a pounding industrial wasteland of dirty noise.

The title track suggests the rush from drugs, The Gift is a spoken word story told over music, of an obsessive man posting himself to the object of his unwanted affections, Lady Godiva’s Surgery is a similar concept but more musical, of a nightmarish possibly gender-reassignment surgery – the band, and Lou Reed especially, were inspired by William Burroughs, and there’s a Burroughs-esque hallucinatory property to the album.

Most of all is the final track, Sister Ray. I saw that the album was 40 minutes long but only 6 tracks, and when this track started I had to check, surely I wasn’t near the end yet. No, this track is 17 minutes long, with a trance-inducing pounding backdrop against which John Cale’s organ playing wanders in and out (bringing to mind most of all The End by The Doors) and Reed’s guitar, like a tortured Hendrix, solos amid the grime while, like Jim Morrison, Reed’s vocals are more percussive interjection (about “suckin’ on my ding-dong") as they are melody. It’s hard to pick out the subject matter but it’s basically about drag queens and sailors having a drug-fuelled orgy, with a police raid and a death mixed in, so darkly transgressive stuff.

I’ve come to think that perhaps the darker and grimier the album, the more I’m enamoured of it, what that says about me, I dread to think.