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Musician Lou Reed, 1966 in New York
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Adam Ritchie/Redferns/Getty Images
Album of the week:
Lou Reed - "Words and Music, May 1965"
Exploring the demo archives of deceased musicians can also be tantamount to opening the Pandora box: the honorable pop idol could all too easily slip off its pedestal through the revelation of early silliness or dilettantism.
Luckily, the posthumous release of amateur recordings by later Velvet Underground musician and rock avant-gardist Lou Reed has nothing embarrassing to offer.
But maybe that's a bit of a shame for one of the stars most feared by critics during their lifetime because of their notorious arrogance and grumpiness, because in retrospect it would be very healing to hear the perfectionist Reed fail colossally at something.
Instead, and this is no less cathartic, on "Words and Music, May 1965" one often experiences the public monster Lou Reed as a sympathetic dabbling youngster who has a lot of talent, but not yet the right form, the right vessel for it has found.
Lovingly curated and designed by his widow Laurie Anderson and US label Light in the Attic, the archival album, the first in a planned series, features Reed as an experimental folk singer.
However, he already has a firm grip on some of his later song monuments, including »Heroin«.
In early 1965, Reed, who had grown up on Long Island, lived in an apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side with violist John Cale, who had just arrived from Wales.
The 23-year-old began making music and writing songs while still in college, hiring himself as in-house songwriter for pop label Pickwick Records.
Together with Cale he briefly formed the band The Primitives, which had a scene hit with the parodic novelty song "The Ostrich".
Reed's musical career could have gone in completely different directions at this point. He once named the jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman as one of his greatest role models.
But the musical signs in early '60s New York were more the folk music that Bob Dylan and Joan Baez played in the Village,
Reed and Cale were not unaffected by this either.
Reed sent the finished tape to his old home address, a common legal practice at the time,
poor man's copyright
, where the envelope then survived unopened for around 50 years, most recently in the care of his sister.
At the beginning of each sizzling recording, Reed speaks the song title and the phrase "Words and Music by Lou Reed."
Unlike the original tape, which is now a museum piece, the album here begins with one of two versions of the Velvet Underground classic »I'm Waiting For The Man«, not yet in the later, abstract staccato gear, but in a rural one Talking blues, which is more in line with the lyrics, which are about a country bumpkin looking for drugs in the big city.
The other demo version of the song plays more with the doo-wop style that Reed explored at Pickwick.
Thoroughly transformed on Berlin in 1973, Men of Good Fortune is Reed in competent Dylan mode, though its lyrics, written from a woman's perspective, were radically original by the standards of the time.
Then follows "Heroin", plucked sparingly on the guitar,
but already spelled out in all its junkie drabness and delivered by Reed with a foreshadowing of his later steely laconicism.
»Pale Blue Eyes«, on the other hand, still lacks a lot of the sinister indolence of the later Velvet Underground version in this traditional folkie form.
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Lou Reed
Words and Music, May 1965
Label: Light in the Attic / Cargo
Label: Light in the Attic / Cargo
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All the more fun are the impetuous experiments in which Reed tries out the trends of the time and noticeably sets himself apart from them by searching for his own language, his later unmistakable, stoic singing style, his will, harmony and loveliness with sarcasm and abysmal to counter narratives.
"Too Late" could also be a whimsical studio gimmick by the Beatles, the ravishingly over-the-top "Buttercup Song", complete with howling hillbilly and the inflationary use of the harmonica, is pure vaudeville theater infected with early psychedelic rock.
Finally, there are fragments culled from other demos, including a nice, albeit very well behaved, fingerpicking version of Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and a cover of the devout Highwaymen hit "Michael, Row The." Boat Ashore«, in which the cynic and doubter Reed can actually be heard whispering »Hallelujah« several times, quite unironically.
How good for rock history that John Cale, who was already experimenting with the Fluxus philosophy and drones at the time, was more impressed by originals like »Heroin« and finally felt compelled to work with the young, wild freak, who was just learning to play the guitar at the time, to form an avant-garde band.
The folk bliss and other traditions were soon driven out of the 1960s.
But that's rock history, as you know, which has now been enriched by an informative - and also very entertaining - chapter with the release of the Reed demos.
(without rating)
Listened briefly:
Blackpink – »Born Pink«
The exciting question is not how successful Blackpink will be with their sixth album in five years (very successful), but how long they will continue to submit to the constraints of the South Korean pop industry - or dissolve in favor of solo projects.
In any case, the record-breaking girl group's contract with the market-dominant label YG Entertainment expires in 2023. It is conceivable that the band, which has been immensely popular in the USA since a Coachella appearance in 2019, will move overseas and emancipate itself from long-term sound designer Teddy Park.
Features with international stars and producers, which are conspicuously absent here, would be interesting - and would free the K-Pop genre from its sometimes too tight bubble.
The compact, mostly glittery,
rattling on imaginary prison bars in the beautifully dragged-out R&B track "Tally."
Escape from the dollhouse.
rattling on imaginary prison bars in the beautifully dragged-out R&B track "Tally."
Escape from the dollhouse.
(7.0)
The Stars – »Hello Euphoria«
Because the band itself offers the reference with their successful and beautifully dreary Blumfeld homage »Gleich hinter Krefeld«: They could have called their 13th album »Testament der Helplessness« instead of the spontaneously ironic »Hallo Euphoria«.
After the personnel reorganization by singer and lyricist Frank Spilker, the stars have settled comfortably between domesticated funk, easy listening and krautrock, you could call it discursive pop for adults.
With age, however, the anger also evaporates and leaves room for a lot of melancholy on one side and the other, maliciously one could also call it a vacuum, but it still sparkles in the star cosmos: Spilker names the evils of our present – climate change, capitalism – definitely concise and even lets the band saddle up on the veteran clash groove of »The Magnificent Seven«,
to deliver an effective eco-doomsday anthem for his age cohort with Die Welt wird Knusprig.
"The children need space" also has a similar reminder pressure, but the actually angry accusation of consumerism "No one comes out innocent" is squandered in the sluggish element-of-crime gibberish despite the startling noise intermezzi.
Spilker, who is traditionally the hippest intellectual of the so-called Hamburg School, knows: "Pretentious pseudo-lyricism won't bring us the revolution," senses his own irrelevance in the casual penetration of the everyday, contradictory "ping-pong" dialectic ("Just because I'm doing something here chant, it doesn't have to exist for a long time«) and states in the beautiful, unusually elegiac final chanson »We know nothing«.
True of course.
And so, in the end, unfortunately, you don't know
whether »Hello Euphoria« is a good record – or simply irrelevant in its aesthetic reflection of the great, general quarreling and hesitation.
"It's a bit sad/ And it's mean too," Spilker sings at one point.
That's how it looks.
And the revolution?
Just have to do the younger ones.
(7.5)
Eliza - »A Sky Without Stars«
There is arguably no more efficient duo in British R&B right now than singer Eliza Sophie Caird and her longtime producer and programmer Finlay "Phairo" Robson.
At least that's the conclusion one has to come to after listening to »A Sky Without Stars«: Eliza's second album after the emancipatory departure from the major record deal and her manufactured, uncomfortable pop alter ego Eliza Doolittle is a masterpiece of reduction.
The 34-year-old sings like a sleepwalker, but with a lot of intensity, sensual and quite complex things about light pollution, loss of nature and willfully lonely female drifters under starless, nightly city skies.
In addition, sometimes soft strings chirp, guitars are carefully plucked, Moog synthesizers toot like distant industrial sirens;
the driving
(8.5)
Schwesta Ewa – »Awanta«
For a long time it was thought that former pimp Ewa Malanda only flaunted her career as a rapper as an accessory, but her real life always seemed more exciting than her rhymes.
After surviving imprisonment (for bodily harm and tax evasion), disclosure book and own RTL documentary, Schwesta Ewa should actually make even less effort, the voyeurism of the media and their Insta followers when they pose lightly dressed again is the 38-year-old from Frankfurt sure anyway.
All the more gratifying that their fourth album »Awanta« has become their best and most convincing so far.
more on the subject
Interview with Schwesta Ewa: "First puff damage, now roof damage" by Laura Backes and Andreas Borcholte
In the first half, Ewa is more competent than ever as the life-hardened gangster boss of German rap, who has more eggs than male colleagues – and doesn't care about pop appeal ("Leave the harmonies, I'm not Cardi B.")
Beats and verses fit well, was again produced by buddy and label boss Xatar, guests like Bausa increase the genre's market value.
In the second half, »Awanta« then gains amazing depth when Ewa sets her soap opera to music with ballads like »190 Days« and »No Help«, in which her two-year-old daughter Aaliyah, who is said to have become her after sex and crime, also has a say purpose of life has become: Original Mother instead of OG.
Whether you want to take Ewa's refined role as #Metoo solo sister in chart-ready pieces like "No means no" or "The sister you never had" from Ewa,
everyone has to decide that for themselves.
The female German rap, still struggling for credit, can definitely get over one sitting so confidently on the throne
Queen Bitch
rejoice.
(7.3)
