![]() ![]() 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. ![]() ![]() 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. Album DescriptionEach 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. See More Your browser does not support the audio element. White Light/White Heat is easily the least accessible of The Velvet Underground's studio albums, but anyone wanting to hear their guitar-mauling tribal frenzy straight with no chaser will love it, and those benighted souls who think of the Velvets as some sort of folk-rock band are advised to crank their stereo up to ten and give side two a spin. The album opens with an open and enthusiastic endorsement of amphetamines (startling even from this group of noted drug enthusiasts), and side one continues with an amusing shaggy-dog story set to a slab of lurching mutant R&B ("The Gift"), a perverse variation on an old folktale ("Lady Godiva's Operation"), and the album's sole "pretty" song, the mildly disquieting "Here She Comes Now." While side one was a good bit darker in tone than the Velvets' first album, side two was where they truly threw down the gauntlet with the manic, free-jazz implosion of "I Heard Her Call My Name" (featuring Reed's guitar work at its most gloriously fractured), and the epic noise jam "Sister Ray," 17 minutes of sex, drugs, violence, and other non-wholesome fun with the loudest rock group in the history of Western Civilization as the house band. Recorded without the input of either Nico or Andy Warhol, White Light/White Heat was the purest and rawest document of the key Velvets lineup of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, capturing the group at their toughest and most abrasive. The world of pop music was hardly ready for The Velvet Underground's first album when it appeared in the spring of 1967, but while The Velvet Underground and Nico sounded like an open challenge to conventional notions of what rock music could sound like (or what it could discuss), 1968's White Light/White Heat was a no-holds-barred frontal assault on cultural and aesthetic propriety. El disc va ser editat el 1968 pel segell Verve Records. Gravat en uns pocs dies el 1967, aquest disc deixa de costat el costat més pop del primer disc de la banda igual que a Nico i a Andy Warhol, que van ser acomiadats després del primer disc. Purchase and download this album in a wide variety of formats depending on your needs. White Light/White Heat és el segon disc de The Velvet Underground. ![]()
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