The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat download free

This album is pretty simple, there’s not much to say about it. Each of the songs takes a very simple groove and progression and just executes on it very well, rumbling along with a warm, rounded off sound. It might seem like a contrarian record based on its approach, with its lack of cymbals, its rambling jams, its minimalist aesthetic; but it still has that backbeat, all the way through, and each of the tracks just gets right down to the heart of rock and roll, and stays nestled in there contentedly. On shorter tracks, we get the groove explicated concisely, and we get in and out in just as much time as it takes to demonstrate how the song would run if it had infinite verses and no one ever got tired, so you can use your imagination/have an hour long jam of the title track with your cover band if you need to. Longer tracks shift around a bit; ‘The Gift' has a great driving rhythm section, approaching furniture music as it repeats tirelessly for the eight minutes of the track, as the lead vocal and lead guitar kind of build and flollop against each other, neither really rising into the foreground, creating a comforting cocoon of sound. You don’t need to listen too closely to the words here, or anywhere else, but they’re about a man posting himself to a woman, and they are probably far out. The other longer jam, ‘Sister Ray’, goes to a lot of places, and eventually the backbeat spreads to all of the downbeats and everyone has to be a bit abrasive to keep up (although in the entire album there isn’t actually enough high end to really be abrasive in any way), and then it quiets down in a beautiful moment as the vocals come back in. The side two opener, ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ has some wonderfully crunchy stuff at the start and the end, but even that just hits a really pleasing stride in the middle. As I said, not much to say. It’s just a very well executed album sonically, and every song has some very well explicated groove, and it’s all nice to listen to. The cover of this release is like all black, but there’s a shiny shape in the bottom left corner, but it looks like an ink blot. The reverse has a cool white and black picture of the band. Nice.Watch for: budabudabudabuda bu da!