The Velvet Underground & Nico
| The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground & Nico
The Velvet Underground & Nico is the debut album by American rock band the Velvet Underground, released in March 1967 by Verve Records. It was recorded in 1966 while the band were featured on Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour, which gained attention for its experimental performance sensibilities and controversial lyrical topics, including drug abuse, prostitution, sadomasochism and sexual deviancy. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Billboard
2017 - t’s mesmerizing. It’s weird. It’s beautiful. It’s grating. It’s experimental. It’s catchy. It’s a bit confusing.
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Pitchfork
2012 - listening through the entire massive collection of material results in a sharper-edged portrait of the group than there's ever been, with all of the danger filled back in
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Observer
2017 - Showed Us the Beauty of Danger
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All Music
Few rock albums are as important as The Velvet Underground & Nico, and fewer still have lost so little of their power to surprise and intrigue more 50 years after first hitting the racks.
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Rolling Stone
2017 - Stolen pop riffs, Warhol’s wild ideas, an ill-fated Greenwich Village residency and other elements that influenced the band’s legendary debut
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NPR
2010 - I can understand how The Velvet Underground and Nico was completely groundbreaking at the time and it certainly sets a mood. ... but after this review, I had enough to last me for a while.
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Pop Matters
2002 - It may change your life, or it may not, but I guarantee you'll hear music differently after listening to it. Music does not get any more essential than this.
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Consequence of Sound
2017 - Spend a "Sunday Morning" with this influential and timeless musical treasure.
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Soundblab
2012 - All eleven songs that originally appeared on the album represent a fully formed musical and lyrical vision individually and as a part of the whole. ... it is timeless
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BBC
2002 - Here was a group that knew of the depths of perversity to which people could sink and frankly sounded as if they didn't care either.
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Classic Rock Review
2012 - Perhaps the album with the single biggest gap between initial commercial success and ultimate historical relevance, The Velvet Underground & Nico has become a legendary fountainhead of influence and inspiration.
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Sputnik Music
2006 - The Velvet Underground may have started something great, but it wasn’t always done in a way that could have truly made itself intrinsically great. Good try, but no fish.
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The Vinyl Factory
2017 - Its incomparable strangeness, beauty and bravery will stun any one of any age in any era.
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Artifacts
2015 - it has emboldened generations of young people to push artistic boundaries and abstract ideas usually reserved for exclusive professional institutions, , exploring artistic decisions and processes through pop–the people’s music
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Uncut
2012 - The Velvet Underground & Nico is a timely reminder (if one is needed) that Reed at his best had few peers and no equals, and that his writer’s eye – literate, probing, explicit – was unflinching right from the start.
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The Student Playlist
2017 - Its archaic aura conceals a timeless capacity that continues to influence and inspire nearly all that come into contact with it.
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No Ripcord
2012 - It’s the sound of a band taking its own idea of what it means to be a rock band and transforming it into a single, harrowing statement. Nothing is held back, and nothing is spared.
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Prodigy
2017 - All I can say is listen. It may surprise or even startle you, but is important to recognise a true classic and the blueprint for the Alternative wave.
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Spill Magazine
It’s sometimes ugly and uncomfortable, but through all its nastiness, there is beauty and if your musical palate is strong enough, there’s lots of it.
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The Scholarly Kitchen
2017 - arguably, a culturally more important work of art
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HHS News
2017 - If The Velvet Underground & Nico manages to still sound so unique after 50 years, it isn’t crazy to suggest that it will continue to do so for decades on.
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Louder Sound
2017 - Lou Reed’s nihilistic punk cynicism sought to choke the hippies’ Nutopian optimism at birth, and this album was its glorious garrotte.
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Don Ignacio
This is an album that I find I can only listen to when I'm sitting alone in a room and paying direct attention to it, and it takes quite a lot for me to break my concentration on it.
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
Utterly different from the later records and anything else recorded in the 60s, it's a classic that you at least should give a listen to, even if you can't deal with the sloppy playing and excessive jamming.
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Esquire
2013 - It has a menacing electrical presence that no other record of the time can approach. Reach out and touch it and you'll find that it can still shock.
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Library of Wales
2017 - Underground and Nico; an album that continues to act as the primary set text for any self-respecting suburban outsider.
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Only Solitaire
Overrated as hell, but there are gorgeous moments of revelatory beauty on this album which I'd never dismiss, for one.
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Tidal Rising
2017 - What The Beatles did for pop and rock at large, The Velvet Underground did for punk, post-punk, art-rock, grunge, and every variation of alternative, indie and experimental rock of the past half century.
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Ultimate Classic Rock
2017 - It's inspired tons of artists from the punk, New Wave and indie-rock genres over the years.
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Adrian's Album Reviews
Ahhhh! This is SUCH a great album! 'I'll Be Your Mirror' is so beautiful, Nico with her voice, that voice with narrow range, almost half speaking rather than singing.
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Irish Times
2018 - This album perfectly captures the freedom, creativity and grittiness of its time. The beauty and purity of the honest lyrics, delicate melodies and ragged guitars have the power to hurt.
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TV Tropes
Also a Cult Classic, since it didn't sell well upon its original release, but did become one of the best known rock albums in history.
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U Discover Music
2017 - Street-tough and uncompromising in its art-rock vision, that still holds true for the album today.
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Mark's Record Reviews
there are definitely a few songs that force chill bumps onto the arm of even me .... However, endless messy boring-as-dirt tracks like "Heroin" and "European Son" totally suck out all the energy generated by perfectly normal catchy little songs
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Head Heritage
a very strange heavy folk-rock LP
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The Line of Best Fit
2012 - graced with eleven songs, each of which has left its mark on music in its own way
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Drowned in Sound
The Velvet Underground & Nico was the point that pop and art started to speak the same language, and it was good.
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Sequart Organization
2017 - The Velvet Underground and Nico is the example par excellence of a popular music album famous for its quality, not its sales.
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XS Noize
2016 - In essence Velvet Underground and Nico album broke the mould and paved the way for future generations. It was an era-defining album, that wasn’t fully appreciated until later years.
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Punk News
2002 - This is one of the greatest albums ever because of its simplicity and its entrance to the music scene. Punk has never seemed so perfect.
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Lincoln Journal Star
2012 - “The Velvet Undergound & Nico” is far more focused. It’s about one of the few records that deserve this kind of treatment, and it is the treatment it deserves.
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Robert Christgau
Nico's contained chantoozy sexuality works against the dispassionate abandon of Reed's chant singing for a vocal variety the band will never duplicate, although their ever-increasing mastery of electric noise and throwaway wordplay, will more than make up for it.
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Encore Northern Ireland
Somewhere amongst the wall of noise and dark lyrics, I like so many others fell in love with New York's coolest art project.
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Audio Stream
2012 - a stone-cold classic. Period. You want this record. I have it and I still continue to want it, if you know what I mean.
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Psychobabble
2012 - With such a distinction, and such incredible music, The Velvet Underground and Nico is easily deserving of one of those multi-disc, “super deluxe editions” that maximize profits on a band’s back catalogue. There’s no question that everything in this new six-disc set deserves release.
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