WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT
| The Velvet Underground
WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT
White Light/White Heat is the second studio album by American rock band the Velvet Underground, released in 1968 by record label Verve. It was the band's last studio recording of new material with bassist and founding member John Cale. -wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
2014 - the album was a relentless, screeching, thudding, scoffing assault on the pop sensibilities of its time: six songs with lyrics designed to horrify the bourgeoisie
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Rolling Stone
2018 - Even 50 years after its initial release, it remains a bracing and challenging listen.
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The Quietus
2013 - I love the lunacy of this album, the sheer punkishness of it, the grime and the discordant avant-garde mass of noise. I love the fact that nothing else sounds like it - either recorded in that period or since.
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Uncut
2014 - Reed and Cale’s most experimental work. Still mind-blowing…
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Drowned in Sound
2013 - The album still stands as an epic precursor to the genres that were to dominate the latter part of the century and beyond - punk, grunge, alt rock, prog and no wave all took cues from the crunchy, unhinged rock and roll experiments found here.
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All Music
anyone wanting to hear their guitar-mauling tribal frenzy straight with no chaser will love it, and those benighted souls who think of the Velvets as some sort of folk-rock band are advised to crank their stereo up to ten and give side two a spin
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Something Else Reviews
2013 - But side one, amazing as it is, turns out to be just prep work for side two. The opening number here is “I Heard Her Call My Name,” and contains maybe the most mind-bending guitar solo ever recorded.
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Paste Magazine
2013 - In other words, White Light may not be a good album, but it just might be great.
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The Guardian
2013 - Still, previously unheard Velvets material can't fail to pique some interest ..., while live renditions of I'm Not a Young Man Anymore and an instrumental The Gift stay true to the White Light/White Heat ethos by being reassuringly uncompromising listens.
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Ultimate Classic Rock
2013 - their most abrasive. And by turn, it's their most representative -- a staggering work of controlled chaos and meditative fragility.
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The Morton Report
2013 - For those wishing to own the best sounding, most extensively annotated edition of White Light/White Heat, look no further.
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The Line of Best Fit
The album in and of itself is a must listen
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Consequence of Sound
While White Light was an entirely different cup of Sunday morning tea (excessively spiked, best listened to after a long night that probably never ended), it does maintain moments of Warholian hedonism.
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Crack
But while the raw production is impossible not to admire, the suspect lyrics make it a record that’s a lot harder to love. Perhaps that was the aim all along.
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Don Ignacio
most of these songs are based on a dependable groove
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Adrian's Album Reviews
Everything is here on this album. It may not be an especially clever album lyrically ( although 'The Gift' cracks me up every time ), the playing certainly is primitive, and so is the sound quality. But, these guys had guts to do this. Nobody listened at the time, although they certainly did later.
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Mark's Record Reviews
This one starts off very promising, with a couple of noisy, catchy blues-rockers heralding an unexpectedly energetic and amphetamine-happy new sound.
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Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews
A disastrous mess.
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All Abou Jazz
2010 - the musicianship is high quality and inventive, the band's enthusiasm comes over strongly and the tales of the underbelly of 1960s New York remain as fascinating as ever.
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The 405
2014 - the quintessence of articulated punk
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Renowned for Sound
2013 - it has discreetly been exerting a great influence on punk and art rock bands through the decades
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The Reader
2018 - Even as it reaches the half-century mark, it still has the power to shock.
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Spin
2013 - had a similarly profound effect on punk, noise rock, and other feedback-lacerated, distortion-loving musical genres
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The Vinyl District
2014 - the masterpiece of malignity and malice that is White Light/White Heat
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Louder than War
2013 - it is with White Light / White Heat that you get the perfect encapsulation of his, and the rest of the VU’s, ethos, majesty, and beautiful darkness
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Peek A Boo Music Magazine
2018 - But this is voodoo punk before punk had a name, what it should have been, the summoning up of all the aggression in society, focused and executed, the savage feedback dripping as if a disease, ripping at the albums core.
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The Student Playlist
2018 - vicious, offensive and everything The Velvet Underground will forever be in close allegiance to
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Rocksucker
2013 - Even remastered, in either mono or stereo, the roaring rips of distortion sound like they’re shredding a hole in the space/time continuum.
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WRBB 104.9FM
2018 - Lose yourself in its layers of feedback and noise, and you just may find yourself feeling rewarded for accepting the band’s challenge to conventional music.
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Treblezine
As with the ripple theory, and the butterfly who creates a hurricane on the other side of the world, so The Velvet Underground influenced hundreds upon thousands of musicians to come and the ripples still form.
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Forced Exposure
the Velvets filled that void with an album that is an aural subway car full of drunkards, junkies and whores rumbling through the bowels of NYC with a one way ticket to oblivion
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The Reprobate
2016 - In fact, there’s a strong argument to make that this is the seminal VU album, a solid garage / art rock collision, a low-fidelity slice of rock ‘n’ roll realism as exemplified on the opening title track
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No Depression
2013 - while a bit bloated, especially on disc two, this box set nevertheless contains plenty of indispensable music
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Off the Grid
White Light/White Heat was a more compact whiplash: the exhilarating guitar violence starting with the title track, peaking in Reed’s atonal-flamethrower solo in I Heard Her Call My Name; the experimental sung and spoken noir of Lady Godiva’s Operation and The Gift; the propulsive, distorted eternity of sexual candour and twilight drug life
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Mother Jones
2013 - White Light/White Heat would be essential listening in any case
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Audiophile Review
2014 - Distortion, amplifier and guitar tones and a live room sound is what this recording is about, a bold statement that bombed commercially back in the day but went on to influence generations of musicians and bands.
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The fat Angels Sings
2018 - White Light/White Heat was also the Velvets’ truest record, the most direct, uncompromised document of their deep, personal connections to New York’s avant-garde in the mid-’60s
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Rock Salted
2014 - White Light/White Heat is an album that demands, but also teaches, a most elemental understanding of rock ‘n’ roll. In spite of its demands, it also opens up limitless possibility. It writhes not in perfection but realization.
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Broadway World
2013 - The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat is one of the most confrontational and inspirational second albums ever made by a rock band
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Amino
2017 - When it’s all said and done, you have to get up and wipe off the sweat from you forehead, change your pants, and press play again.
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Kurrent Music
2018 - it permeated between notes. This was probably the biggest slap in the face to the hippie culture, and probably the first brilliantly unlistenable classic of rock
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Elsewhere
2014 - It is raw and, although hard going in places, the better for it.
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Jazz Times
2010 - it was born out of a collision of primitive garage rock, minimalism borrowed from avant-garde classical music and lyrics that reflected the grit of their New York streets. On top of that, it was produced with an approach that threw conventional fidelity to the wind.
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Vinyl Me, Please
the band forged ahead with one of the darkest rock records of all time—and then ran far away
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Pop matters
2013 - It is a perfect distillation of Reed's musical approach. It's difficult but never (or almost never) intentionally so. It's aggressive but never nihilistic. It's noisy but within that noise is beautiful sounds, brilliant songs.
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