Track Listing

1. White Light/White Heat
2. The Gift
3. Lady Godiva's Operation - The Velvet Underground, Tom Wilson, Gary Kellgren
4. Here She Comes Now
5. I Heard Her Call My Name
6. Sister Ray

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6885 in Music
• Released on: 1996-05-20
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 40 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Nothing in their debut could really have prepared fans for the sonic assault the Velvets unleashed in White Light/White Heat. Freed from Andy Warhol's patronage (and Nico's vocals), Lou Reed and company strip production values to a minimum and turn out a primitive rock & roll masterpiece: Everything on this record sounds distorted and abrasive. Depending on how you feel about these sorts of things, this makes it either their best or their worst record. Of course, underneath it all are some of Reed's greatest songs, from the title track to the wistful "Here She Comes Now". It all culminates on side two with the raucously joyous "I Heard Her Call My Name" ("And then my mind split open," Reed sings and his guitar lets you know just about how that would feel) and the epic "Sister Ray"--10 minutes of transcendent, pounding fuzz as Reed searches for his "mainline." --Percy Keegan

CD Description
WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT, the Velvet Underground's second album, is the band at their most hard-edged and skilfully perverse. It introduced guitar sounds and production so abrasive that the feel wasn't duplicated until some 15 years later when punk had matured into New York's downtown art/noise scenewith bands like Sonic Youth.
WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT is also an exhausting exercise in opposites. The aching beauty of "Here She Comes Now" features a delicate guitar melody andReed's most innocent vocals since the debut's "Sunday Morning". The title track would even be playful if not for the instrumental speed rushes and vocal harmonies so discordant they're sinister. It also turns out to be a perfect primer for"Sister Ray", a depraved freak show of prostitutes, junkies, and what happens when the cops come banging at the door. Musically, "Sister Ray" is a jarring guitar crash, clocking in at 17:25, fully showing the Velvets' musical ferociousness. Such snapshots into the Velvet Underground's two sides make WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT indispensable.

Customer Reviews

The best reason in the world to go deaf!
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!

don't buy this one first
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.

White Light/White Heat
although it has probably been said a million times before by now, it has to be said again: the Velvets invented almost every great band of the last 25 years. Joy Division used to cover Sister Ray, Jesus and Mary Chain wouldn't have worn black, sang about drugs or used transcendent guitar fuzz.

this is good