BEST OF VELVET UNDERGROUND RAR PLUS
If you’re not familiar with them, on the other hand, this CD will likely prompt you to seek out their albums, as well as those of many of the indie-rock participants on I’ll Be Your Mirror, most of whom are less well known than they deserve to be.Īs for the soundtrack from The Velvet Underground, Haynes’s documentary film, it fills two CDs and contains 11 performances from across the group’s catalog plus five related tracks: “The Wind,” a fine 1954 number by the Diablos, one of the doo-wop groups that Reed admired a live reading of “Road Runner,” by Bo Diddley, another Reed influence a 1963 track from the Theatre of Eternal Music, an avant-garde band that included Cale and foreshadowed his work with the Velvets “The Ostrich,” a 1964 garage-rock song that Reed co-authored and performed with a group called the Primitives and “Chelsea Girls,” the title song from Nico’s 1967 debut solo LP, which Reed and the Velvets’ Sterling Morrison co-wrote. If you love the group, you’ll love this, too.
The lion’s share of the album, which includes liner notes by Stipe, finds the Velvets’ classic music wed to creative arrangements and four- and five-star performances. Also excellent is Courtney Barnett’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” which seems darker than the Velvets’ original.īut this is a quibble. (Stipe’s group previously covered three Velvets songs on their 1981 album Dead Letter Office.) But Andrew Bird and Lucius’s take on Reed’s “Venus in Furs” is also terrific, with its plucked guitar strings and foreboding violins. If one had to pick a favorite track, it might be the lead-off number, an otherworldly reading of Reed and John Cale’s ominous “Sunday Morning” by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe that opens with clarinet rather than the original version’s celeste. Rather than simply offer an affectionate nod to the Velvets’ captivating recordings, the best of these covers put a fresh spin on them while remaining true to their spirit. Called I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground and Nico, the 55-minute CD presents renditions of all the songs from the group’s debut LP in the order they originally appeared. Hal Willner (who collaborated on several occasions with the Velvets’ Lou Reed and whose projects included the excellent Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill) produced the covers collection shortly before his Covid-related death in April 2020. The latest crop includes a fascinating documentary about the band from director Todd Haynes, a soundtrack album from that film, and a CD of cover versions of their songs. It’s not surprising, then, that around 50 years later, the group still has a devoted and growing fan club or that Velvets-related material continues to appear. An often-quoted line, generally attributed to Brian Eno, is that their first LP sold only 30,000 copies but everyone who bought it formed a band. Yet they made some of rock’s best, most innovative, and most influential music. The Velvet Underground broke up about half a century ago, having never had anything close to a hit album or single.