In trying to think about why this, the Velvet Underground's first album, pushes my buttons in the way that it does, it's difficult to get past the way it sounds. "Venus in Furs" is still my favourite, and in many ways it embodies the template - resounding and resonant, jangling lines circling and repeating, wrapped up in an atmosphere of cloud mystery, Reed intoning sinister nothings over a musical bed that's as crystalline as it is chaotic - but the record really unfurls all the way from start to finish; in other words, from gently twinkling "Sunday Morning" to the clamorous closing descent of "The Black Angel's Death Song" and "European Son", and in between Nico's two melodically wrought dirges, "Femme Fatale" and "I'll Be Your Mirror", two relatively concise rock turns on "Run Run Run" and "There She Goes Again", the epic centre comprised by "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "Heroin", and of course "Venus in Furs" and, almost at the very beginning, the other song on the record which in many ways best seems to sum up what it's all about, "I'm Waiting For The Man".
The Velvet Underground are a reference point for me in more ways than one, and more often than not it boils down to this record. If it makes any difference, I can easily credit that the Velvets have been just as influential as everyone says they are, including, directly or indirectly (but probably fairly directly) on many of my particular faves (say Galaxie 500, the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Mazzy Star to name just four). I don't think it's too fanciful to think of this album as continuing to reverberate down the decades through everything that's come since - indeed, to go further and, with the benefit of hindsight, say that it was, indeed, the crucial break with whatever had come before, announcing the possibility and arrival of something new. And yet to listen to it now is still to be caught up in something which withholds as much as it reveals, something that sounds only like itself, something inexplicably, undeniably great.
