White Light/White Heat cover

White Light/White Heat

Released

The second Velvets album is a bit less celebrated than their epochal debut, but is full of moments that equal or sometimes exceed its predecessor. “Here She Comes Now” is as gorgeously disquieting as “Sunday Morning” but the final two tracks take the noisy inclinations of the band to their outer limits: “I Heard Her Call My Name” is a speaker-shredding garage rocker with a free jazz guitar solo that splits Lou Reed’s mind open, while “Sister Ray” is a 17-minute travelogue of noise improvisation based on a Wilson Pickett riff – it’s a masterful document of the underworld, as scary as it is alluring, like a late-’60s rock and roll version of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

Joshua Levine

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