![]() Similarly, “I Heard Her Call My Name” is dominated – overwhelmed, even – by Reed’s defiantly unruly lead guitar, popping and shrieking with uncontrolled feedback. The former, presented as a deadpan paean to methamphetamine, is a malevolent centrifuge with Cale’s bass right at the front of the mix: the relentless violence of his playing is quite without precedent. The title track and “I Heard Her Call My Name” are extreme, benchmark recordings: electric music at its most unstable and charged. “Death” is emblazoned on the banner beneath the skull, but for all its downer iconography and surly, nihilist content, White Light/White Heat radiates a life-affirming belligerence. The skull tattoo at bottom left is modeled by Joseph Spencer, star of Andy Warhol’s 1967 film Bike Boy. ![]() White Light/White Heat’s blunt impact begins with that album cover, portending the music within: a forbidding black-on-black monolith with covertly telling details. The migraine murk of its unglamorous non-production, its contrasting clarity of intent, its murderous performances, and the flinty, unsentimental reportage of Reed’s lyrics ring-fenced it as an obstinate manifesto from which, the best part of a decade later, punk greedily drew style and substance. Roundly ignored (or regarded as a wholly alien artifact) at the time of its release, White Light/White Heat not only provided a bracingly harsh audio vérité snapshot of the band’s chaotic circumstances at the time of recording, but also, in its way, foretold the future. It would subsequently emerge that Reed was fiercely proud of the album – with every justification. Listen to White Light/White Heat (Super Deluxe) now. In the most commonly circulated shot, Sterling Morrison, with eyebrows arched, wryly executes a “ta-daaa” gesture towards the LP sleeve Maureen Tucker stares impassively into the camera lens John Cale, presciently, is already looking elsewhere and Lou Reed, inscrutable behind his shades, wears an expression notable only for its outright lack of any discernible emotion. ![]() Dangerous and unpredictable, White Light/White Heat is a raw and often improvisational album that contains some of the Velvet Underground’s most powerful music.In early 1968, The Velvet Underground uncharacteristically posed, with apparent good humor, for a publicity photo to mark the launch, on January 30 of that year, of their pathologically uncompromising second album, White Light/White Heat. As strong and weird as these songs are, nothing prepares the listener for the searing 17-minute closer, “Sister Ray.” The song’s punishing and elemental guitar riff, blown-out organ, and tribal drumming collide on a noise-jam for the ages, as Reed paints an appropriately seedy portrait of grungy debauchery with his minimal lyrics. “I Heard Her Call My Name” features a blistering and overdriven guitar solo that tests the sonic limitations of magnetic tape. “Here She Comes Now” is, on the one hand, a catchy rock song, but Lou Reed’s stuttering delivery and Maureen Tucker’s bashing percussion give it an otherworldly atmosphere. So while the album’s opening title track has a memorable call-and-response refrain that a group in another universe might fashion into a Top 40 hit, the Velvets drive the tune home with grinding repetition and clanging, in-the-red sonics from producer Tom Wilson. ![]() But here they delivered the songs with a half-turn of additional intensity, and the recording’s ragged edges amplify the artful chaos. The Velvets assembled White Light/White Heat from some of the same elements as the rest of the group’s catalog, mixing pop genres like garage rock and R&B with streetwise poetry and folding in abstraction on loan from classical avant-garde. The band’s second album, 1968’s White Light/White Heat, was their noisiest and harshest record, and much of the underground rock of the '70s and '80s can be traced back to it. Each of the Velvet Underground’s first four studio LPs was unique in terms of sound and style, and each left its own mark on music history. ![]()
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