The Velvet Underground & Nico

The best parts of this album are the dreamy, trance-like tracks (I'll Be Your Mirror, Sunday Morning, Femme Fatale). It also goes to the complete other extreme with grating, droning tracks like Heroin and Venus in Furs, which work very well. Thrown in are a couple mid rock songs.

I was going to say that European Son was the "Revolution 9" of the album and then found that someone on Reddit said the EXACT same thing about it 😭 (by this I mean the song frankly sounds terrible but is still fun and deserves to be on the album to complete the experience)

After a re-listen I enjoy this even more and it’s become one of my favorites. By far Lou Reed’s greatest achievement in songwriting I’ve heard so far. The songs are catchy and hummable yet beautiful and complex. The out of tune and fuzzy instruments are amazing and give the entire album an emotional, homemade vibe. Lou Reed and Nico aren’t the world’s greatest singers but I care more about emotion more than how you sound. Kurt Cobain and John Fogerty aren’t great vocalists because they are amazing singers but because they put a heavy amount of soul and passion into their vocals, and it’s the same with Lou Reed and Nico. The instruments as well aren’t in tune or on time, but they are clearly played with passion and that’s what matters to me. The lyrics are poetic and sound lovely, yet they tackle heavy themes like addiction and loneliness. This album paints a depressing picture of NYC in the late 60’s and listening to it is engaging and thought provoking. This album’s raw and homemade aesthetic was influential to the punk scene and alternative rock as a whole, you can see the influence this album had on famous bands like Nirvana and Radiohead.