The Velvet Underground & Nico

In 1966 the Velvet Underground and their friend Nico invented sounding like shit on purpose, and from that moment, white people finally had a way to be cool, seven years after Miles Davis had invented it

Ground Zero for what would later be called indie/alternative/punk/post-punk. That doesn't make it good, but it also happens to be very very good.

Predictably, it might be the easiest 5 stars I hand out on this challenge.

This is such a foundational record. You can hear the push and pull of John Cale’s drones with Lou Reed’s Doo-Wop lyrics about heroin. Throw in some Nico and baby you got yourself a stew!

i mean legendary album, loved it

What a treat. Heading out for a day out on the motorbike in the morning before it gets too hot. Already a 5 star album made even better.

Pioneering. Influential. Awesome.

Está bien, pero no me ha resultado la obra maestra que todo el mundo dice que es. Dicen que se nota mucho el trabajo de John Cale: po vale.

A lot of my favorite music can trace influences back to this album, either directly or indirectly. So ya, this is an easy 5 stars

The Velvet Underground & Nico
I love how this lures you in with the sweetly naive and childlike sound of Sunday Morning, despite it actually being about paranoia, before descending into the squalid urban drug buying tale of I’m Waiting for the Man, with its unrelenting, driving, droning guitar and piano, rightly a rock classic.

The quality of song doesn’t relent over the remaining 40-odd minutes. Femme Fatale’s vaguely sinister Mittel-Europa do-wop is excellent and Venus in Furs is of course absolutely superb, a brooding, sharp edged, Middle-Eastern infused ode to S&M. I’ve come to love Run, Run, Run over the years, I love the pared back groove and the mixing of drug taking and religion in the lyrics, with Reed’s very Neil-esque guitar. All Tomorrow’s Parties is yet another stellar song, closing the first side with an undeviating, droning, dissonant inevitability, augmented by Nico’s strange tone and amelodic brilliance.

Heroin is yet another fantastically great song, building to a frenzied squall of guitar and viola, mirroring the depiction of heroin use in the lyrics. There She Goes’s jangly upbeat 60s pop is brilliantly sequenced after the freneticism of Heroin, although of course played through the lens of Lou Reed’s dirty mind. I’ll Be Your Mirror is another song I’ve really come to love, providing another little left turn into a relatively direct, sincere and delicate love song. The Black Angel’s Death Song is another great bit of sequencing after I’ll Be Your Mirror, a discordant, psychedelic exercise in noise, disjointed words and discomfort. European Son is another great song, with feedback and distortion swirling around a superbly relentless bass line, the whole song casting forward to White Light/White Heat.

It’s quite a mad album for 1967 set against what bands on the West Coast were doing and the prevailing summer of love psychedelic whimsy and acid rock tedium. It’s a cliche to say it’s ahead of its time, but its influence is undoubtedly gargantuan, and crucially it lives up to its reputation, and for me it's one of those albums that seems to get better and better the more I listen to it, with it’s crude and distorted production a genuine strength, feeding into the squalid New York Basement atmosphere of the whole album.

Straightforward 5.
🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌
Playlist submission: Could be every song, but I’ll go I’m Waiting for the Man

Andy Warhol created some truly iconic album covers - alongside “Sticky Fingers,” this one is probably the best known. I still find the idea of incorporating tactile elements - in this case, the banana peel - into the cover particularly striking (even though there have been many imitators since then, though none nearly as successful).
Consequently, the Velvet Underground - already generating so much visual buzz - also enlisted a supermodel to accompany them in the studio and on stage.
There’s music on the album, too, but in my view, it doesn’t even come close to matching the image I just described. Lou Reed’s outlandish ideas come through here pretty much unfiltered, which doesn’t sound nearly as good as that sentence does. Large sections are original, but by no means catchy. And Nico? Well, she certainly isn’t singing on the album because of her brilliant vocal technique...
My recommendation: while listening to “Sunday Morning,” slowly peel the banana, drink an espresso, smoke something if you like, and then switch to a later Lou Reed album in good time!

Eh this was a weak 3. Wasn’t life changing and wasn’t horrible. Won’t be revisiting

Sometimes boring, often painful to listen to. The music was poor, and neither of those two can sing

Listened to this once many years ago and found it to be just okay. Upon revisiting, I found myself appreciating this a whole lot more. I see the hype now.

A tour de force

Well hello there old friend. We’ve met MANY times before. Easy 5 here. Listen to everything else being released in 1967 and then listen to this. The perfect counterbalance to love and peace. Low fi, dark, magic. It’s the real deal.

Went into this with demand avoidance thinking it would be underwhelming or overhyped. It sounds primitive but so fundamentally different to popular rock music at the time that I can see how influential it ended up being for grungier 70s/80s punk and rock. Clearly pushed boundaries on subject matter and didn't have a notably weak song. 5 whole stars

Decent, all around. Wished it got a little bit more funky here and there.

gotta pay the 1 star nico toll!

This is a holy grail for me, even though I have to admit that I find bananas (as in the fruit) a tad overrated. Their taste and texture are rather meh if you don’t eat them at the perfect stage of your preferred ripeness. In my humble opinion, this is the only even remotely controversial point one could raise when it comes to this ever-stunning piece of musical history. Glad that you can peel the skin off the cover…

Not a TRUE 5-star album - "European Son" is a tough sell - but for the purposes of this website? Absolutely.

4.5/5