While Nico was the member of the Velvet Underground
who had had the least experience in music prior to joining the group
(while she had recorded a pop single in England, she'd never been a
member of a working band before Andy Warhol introduced her to the Velvets),
she was also the one who strayed farthest from traditional rock &
roll after her brief tenure with the band, and by the time she recorded "Desertshore", her work had little (if anything) to do with traditional
Western pop.
John Cale,
who produced and arranged "Desertshore", once described the music as
having more to do with 20th century classical music than anything else,
and while that may be going a bit far to make a point, even compared to
the avant-rock frenzy of the Velvet Underground's early material, "Desertshore" is challenging stuff. Nico's
dour Teutonic monotone is a compelling but hardly welcoming vocal
presence, and the songs, centered around the steady drone of her
harmonium, are often grim meditations on fate that are crafted and
performed with inarguable skill and intelligence, but are also a bit
samey, and the album's downbeat tone gets to be rough sledding by the
end of side two. Cale's
arrangements are superb throughout, and "My Only Child," "Afraid," and
"The Falconer" are quite beautiful in their own ascetic way, but like
the bulk of Nico's
repertoire, "Desertshore" is an album practically designed to polarize
its listeners; you'll either embrace it's darkness or give up on it
before the end of side one. Then again, given the thoroughly
uncompromising nature of her career as a musician, that's probably just
what Nico had in mind.
Tracklist:
| Janitor Of Lunacy |
4:01
|
| The Falconer |
5:39
|
| My Only Child |
3:27
|
| Le Petit Chevalier |
1:12
|
| Abschied |
3:02
|
| Afraid |
3:27
|
| Mütterlein |
4:38
|
| All That Is My Own |
3:54 |
Nico - Desertshore (1970)
(320 kbps, cover art included)
