Product 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.

Track Listing

1. White Light White Heat
2. The Gift
3. Lady Godiva S Operation
4. Here She Comes Now
5. I Heard Her Call My Name
6. Sister Ray

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5558 in Music
• Released on: 1996-05-20
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Original recording remastered
• 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

Customer Reviews

'Sister Ray' is one of the twenty most important (longer) rock tracks ever recorded
Well I've done Cream's live 'Spoonful' and I've done The Grateful Dead's 'Live Dead' and I've done 'Goodbye Cream' and the most useful thing I can do now is link them to this extraordinary piece in terms of the really important works in a rock canon. And yet in a way it's not extraordinary at all because it was inevitable that someone would do something exactly like this (and probably it would be VU especially considering their direct line back to the minimalist 'engine music' of Lamonte Young). The funny thing about avant-guard art is that it's absolutely inevitable. It's usually also a dead end which is why we are still recycling concepts first put out 100 years ago, or in music 50 years.

It's grueling, grinding, ugly,and punishing just like much of life but if your ears can take it it's gripping, absorbing, and sufficiently rewarding just like life. Why is it rewarding? A good question. Probably because there is pleasure in hearing how they keep up the momentum with very simple minimumist material and as well as being grueling it's also cathartic if you get through it.
By the way, apart from 'Sister Ray' I really haven't got much interest in VU. Although we do agree about 'Sister Ray' I'm no disciple of Lester Bangs who thinks everything has to sound avant-guard or at least unpleasant or be about the downside of drugs (it seems he's allergic to hippies and what he calls 'I Rock') to be musically significant (in fact reading him one might conclude those things are all it needs to be). As far as I'm concerned this is all there is of any importance and there is nothing else which provides intense pleasure or a sense of depth. But there are things which are mildly diverting or offer the usual mild satisfaction through identification. Fair enough. And then there is Nico's voice. It would have been no hardship to hear much more of that but it's not what we get here.
'The Gift' which is on this album and takes up a lot of space is not one of these things. It is a squalid little story that anyone would only want to hear once unless they insisted on playing it to others in the same way that some people seem compelled to repeat jokes that are in the worst possible taste. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth and I'm glad I didn't find it on an album by one of my favorite groups.

But 'Sister Ray's only rival is 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)' by Hendrix. But I would also recommend that you check out the Cream 'Grande Ballroom Detroit 1967' bootleg. You just might be amazed. This is avant-garde too but avant-garde with a future that is to say that it's just as avant as it needs to be and no more. Unfortunately the quality of the recording makes this pretty hard on the ears too.

When I say 'if your ears can take it' that is by way of saying that if you aren't listening on vinyl you need to make sure that you have the most recently remastered release of this or it can be unbearable on some of the better hi-fi systems.

Amazing music
I just heard this for the first time 40 years after it was released. What a fantastic collection of brilliant songs. I particularly love "the gift" and "sister ray". The remastered CD version of "the gift" has the advantage over the original vinyl that the speech track and the backing track are completely separate, so you can choose to listen just to the music, which I like to do. Amazing, buy it!

Uber Dissonance
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.