White Light / White Heat [Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered]

If you've got this far you probably know this is one of the most critically acclaimed rock albums ever. That is well deserved but it doesn't mean you're going to like it - it's also one of the most uncompromising rock albums ever (one reason the critics like it so much) and was quite unprecedented at the time - and completely out of step with the current hippie/flower power/peace and love ethos. It was also made very quickly and cheaply with an engineer who wasn't hugely enamoured of the group, so the niceties of production were pretty much non-existent. This doesn't matter, for the most part, as long as you like extreme, noisy, brutish rock'n'roll.

The title track is a short, snappy slice of distorted rock'n'roll which you could imagine being recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard - although it would sound very different. Then they slow down for The Gift, with the band jamming grungily away on 3 chords in one channel while John Cale, with his marvellously deadpan Welsh voice, recites an amusing and macabre short story Lou Reed wrote while studying English in the early 1960s. This is followed by the two quietest tracks on the album, Lady Godiva's Operation and Here She Comes Now. The former is sung mostly by Cale, with sudden interjections from Reed, and is another macabre little tale over a quite unique droney background with the only appearance of Cale's viola on this album. The latter is by far the most "pleasant" piece of music on the album, a prettily hypnotic little ditty wondering whether a girl will come.

What was side 2 of the original lp begins with probably the most extreme track, I Heard Her Call My Name. By all accounts this doesn't do justice to their live performances of the song and is the one track where the recording shortcomings matter, but it is still quite extraordinary, featuring among the most savagely atonal lead guitar ever committed to tape. This really isn't for the fainthearted but it certainly isn't without merit. And finally... the last 17+ minutes of the album are taken up by the awesome Sister Ray. Again the lyrics (about a bunch of drag queens shooting up heroin and murdering a sailor they don't appear to have known very long) are sordid and macabre, but Lou Reed relates this scuzzy tale with sardonic relish over an astonishing and propulsive one chord blast that never lets up, driven along by Maureen Tucker's hypnotic drumming. They were determined that there wouldn't be either a second take or overdubs - they had to nail it first time. There is no bass, just two guitars, organ and drums. At various points it develops into a volume duel between Lou Reed's guitar and John Cale's organ, with Cale pulling out more and more stops and then Reed cranking up the volume and distortion on his guitar. It never degenerates into self-indulgent jamming or outlives its welcome, indeed for many devotees it's too short. The demented glee with which they bash it out completely transcends the sordid subject matter - this really is rock distilled down to its essence.

Unless you like really abrasive stuff already (e.g. The Stooges' Fun House, with which it shares the pinnacle of proto-grunge) you may well find this a bit much, so it's not the ideal place to start if you haven't heard the Velvet Underground before. Try their equally excellent debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, which is the only one of their albums to combine both pretty tunes and noise and consequently gives a good idea of the range of music they played. If you like the noisy stuff on that, you'll love this. If you don't but like the more tuneful stuff, you'll like their untitled 3rd album and Loaded.

This is my favourite VU album. It is one of those albums that you can't quite play loud enough. The band are at their heaviest instrumentally and Lou sings everything like he is the most pissed off person alive. He sounds, in a Dylan kind of way, like he knows the stuff is so good he doesn't have to try too hard to hit the notes.

The blueprint for loads of subsequent stuff, from early punk (Cale helped the Stooges out on their debut) and Can ('Hallelujah' is really just a funky 'Sister Ray') right up to the whole grunge thing (Check out Nirvana's version of Here she comes now, if you can find it). The most outstanding tracks are the more extreme - Cale narrating the horrifically funny 'The Gift', the maddest guitar I have ever heard on 'I Heard her call my name' and of course 'Sister Ray' - over 17 minutes of amp abuse that just wears you out.

Dark, disturbing but just so cool. The sound all young guitar based bands want, but never really achieve. This album is the best reason in the world to go deaf!

The Velvet Underground were perhaps the ultimate yin/yang band: with an incredible lyricist who was selfless about who actually sang them, capable of self-surrender ("Jesus") and total egotism (Lou Reed turning down the rest of the band in "I Heard Her Call My Name" - thankfully improved on the remaster), with a musical character capable of howling feedback and sweet chiming melodies, artistic yet streetwise, tough but vulnerable, basic yet relentlessly experimental, concise and pithy but able to do stream-of-consciousness ("Black Angel's Death Song") and a seventeen-minute epic, they had it all.

Where their debut combined all of these assets (making it a candidate for the greatest album of all time - and certainly one of the most influential), "White Light/White Heat" saw them focus on their dissonance and ferocity. (And their next album "The Velvet Underground" was all subdued sweet melodies). Consequently this can be a tough album to listen to, should you prefer the more focused and structured Velvet's songs - there's no "Sweet Jane" here, nor even "Venus In Furs" or "Heroin". In addition, this album is often cited as the worst-recorded album of all time, for the feedback, bleedthrough and distortion of the red-lining guitars and organ blew the studio capability apart (this being the mid-60s we're talking about here).

Nonetheless, this is a remarkable album, with musianship to die for. It starts relatively conventionally, with the eponymous title-track. It features a tremendous honkytonk rhythm, almost similar to "All Tomorrow's Parties", but where that felt portentous, this feels manically exhuberant, appropriately given the subject matter of speed. It ends with an incredible surge of bludgeoning energy, the like of which I have never heard anywhere else.

"The Gift" follows - a Lou Reed short story narrated by John Cale, over the backing of the Velvet's doing their Booker T and the MGs impression. The story is macabre and has an intensely black humour, and some wonderfully deft touches. Waldo's chracter can be immediately surmised by Sheila's two word summary of him..!

"Lady Godiva's Operation" starts fairly conventionally and, like a Burroughs story, just gets weirder and weirder. When Reed's voice cuts through with "Neatly" and "Sweetly" you wonder what planet they were on, and when the shivering starts you know you've never heard the like before. Bizarre but great fun.

"Here She Comes Now" has an achingly beautiful melody, played with impeccable gentleness. But almost in reply they follow with "I Heard Her Call My Name" which seems its crazed half-cousin. Where the narrator in "Here She Comes Now" is in love with a woman who doesn't notice him ("Ahhhh... she's made out of wood"), in "I Heard" the Velvets magnify that moment when love turns her gaze upon you to absurd proportions. Reed's guitar soloing is incredible, hyped and amplified to almost unbearable levels, and featuring perhaps the best use of feedback ever - after he says "And then my mind split open," there's a (relative) pause, and then the feedback explodes.

However all this pales into comparison with the closer "Sister Ray". Reed often mentioned freeform jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman in relation to this song, and so traditional rock concepts of verse and chorus, melody and harmony are out of the window. Built upon a huge surging three-chord riff, "Sister Ray" grows into a monstrous epic, with Reed and Cale almost literally duelling it out, with guitar and organ freeforming and interjecting upon each other and the vocal. Like Coltrane's "Asenscion" and Coleman's "Free Jazz", each seems to take turn to solo while the other instruments comment upon and freeform over it. This gives the whole piece an insane level of musical ferocity - "Sister Ray" was done live, in one take, and no-one backs down at any point to accomodate anyone else. All mighty good, a gleeful musical decontruction. And yet the closing of the song tops all that, when the steady propulsive beat (deftly accelerating or slowing as the song demands) of Mo Tucker's drums finally become as thrashed as the other instruments, which leads to a huge feedback soundblast, an incredible outpouring of sonic energies at the speed of light. Utterly jaw-dropping incredible. Lou Reed's vocals also deserve a mention - he narrates a seedy debauched tale of junky transvestites and a murdered sailor, but two and a half times, and with ever more distortion, playing with the words, stretching them out, misshaping them. Everything is dissonant, distorted, even the lyric and voice. To some, "Sister Ray" is the greatest song ever recorded - it's unsurpassed in many ways. No punk band ever approached this level of power.

In sum, this album is certainly an acquired taste, but if you like feedback, distortion and plain old noise, it's the finest example of its kind, unsurpassed in forty years.