Lou Reed Week - The Raven

Happy Halloween everyone!

My Halloween celebrations and my week of Lou Reed commemorations have overlapped with a listen to his ambitious 2003 concept album, The Raven. A 36 song exploration of the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, it's ideal listening for this, the gloomiest of days.

The list of collaborators alone makes The Raven an irresistible album. Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Willem Dafoe, Anthony Hegarty and, best of all, Steve Buscemi, who proves that he has a really quite lovely singing voice.



And, unbelievably, it's only in the past few days that I've learned that the squalling reeds on Guilty are brought to the table by the immortal Ornette Coleman.



The Raven is a mix of songs and readings. Here you'll find some of the most refined and moving songs of Lou Reed's entire career. Who Am I? is just the very song that got me into this mess in the first place. Call On Me is equally as poignant, whilst on Burning Embers we get the curious sound of Lou Reed channelling Dr. John. There are new and vastly different versions of The Bed and Perfect Day. Fire Music is a return to the punishing noise of Metal Machine Music, whilst in Vanishing Act and Guardian Angel we have two songs which, in the wake of Lou Reed's passing, I find almost too much to bear.





The readings are a bit of a mixed bag. Taken in isolation, though a tad hammy, they're marvellously gloomy realisations of some of Poe's gravest words. Willem Dafoe in particular seems made for this project. Yet when mixed amongst the more bombastic and stirring songs, they can tend to break up the pace.

The Raven is a double album, and once you get used to the spoken word sections, it can be the sort of sprawling monolith in which you can happily immerse yourself. On headphones, alone, at night, with red wine and candles, The Raven is a contender for my very favourite Lou Reed album.

The critics, though, weren't too keen. Pitchfork hated it. Without a doubt the laziest and most boring thing anyone can say about any double album is that, contained within its bloated ranks, there's a perfectly contained single album just waiting to get out.

The thing is, in the case of The Raven, that happens to be true.

The Raven was also released as a single CD album. Though I have plenty of time for the spoken word tracks, I must admit that The Raven flows so much better when the majority of them are cut, as they are on the single CD edition.

I listen to the single CD version a lot more than I do the double, which is reserved for lonely nights and such special days as Halloween.

However, for the best possible listening experience, you have to make a few substitutions of your own. The full band version of Who Am I? as found on NYC Man is much better than The Raven's AOR version. Also, with all due respect for Willem Dafoe, Lou Reed's own reading of The Raven is a lot more thrilling than Willem's studio version (skip to about 1:34:00 in the video below).



Whether you dip into the odd track, replay the single CD or delve fully into the sprawling 36 song banquet, today is the perfect day indeed to revisit The Raven.

But for some truly diabolical Halloween chills, here's The Fall of the House of Usher.

David Bowie - The Next Day

Today I was finally in position to do something I thought I'd never do. Something that music lovers have been doing for four decades. I was able to buy a new David Bowie album on its day of release!

I'm quite wary of listening to it. I hate listening to things for the first time. I never trust my first impressions. They're far too tempered by prejudice, precedence and expectation. I much prefer the curve of gradual appreciation and the ultimate feeling of warm familiarity to the shock of the new. This doesn't mean that I'm adverse to trying new things. It's just that I cannot think of a single album that means anything to me that clicked immediately on the first listen. It takes time to absorb and inhabit music. The first listen isn't something to be treasured. It's something to get over with as soon as possible.

I'm sort of the same with films. There are many films – like Wreck-It-Ralph – that are instantly appealing. But those that we deem to be “classics” are often so-called because they bear repeat viewings. And the main reason they bear repeat viewings is because they're layered – you can't take-in everything in at once. “Classics” are often subtle slow-burners, so I'm always wary when it comes to watching any film that has anything approaching a reputation for the first time.

So I don't want to comment on David Bowie's new album just yet. Nothing I say now can be at all trusted. But if you're really interested in what I think, come back to me in a month or two.

I do believe, though, that there aren't enough hours of existence remaining for me to ever learn to love the album cover.

The Next Day has one of the worst album covers I've ever seen. A crude white box placed over the iconic “Heroes” imagery. Whilst the image underneath has a lovely silvery sheen to it, this still looks like the sort of thing that could easily have been produced on MS Paint in less than a minute.

Things improve a little on the inside. There's a black-on-black square that reminds me of the sort of designs that adorn Autechre albums. It contrasts nicely with the white square on the CD itself, creating a sort of triptych with Bowie's moody disembodied head in the middle.

The lyrics are printed on a colourful fold-out that somewhat resembles one of those posters you used to get in those brown bags dotted around Manchester. In fact, on the inside The Next Day is really quite beautifully designed. Which makes me wonder – what was he thinking with that cover?

It may be awful to look at, but I don't think it's devoid of meaning. The cover is horrible, but the inside is striking. Is this a “comment” on the album itself? A sort of “don't judge a book by its cover” message?

Or is it a sad statement concerning the phasing-out of physical formats in favour of digital? As a collection of MP3s, The Next Day's cover will only ever appear as a small inscrutable square on a media player. Does Bowie think that people have stopped pouring over album covers? Did he see no point in putting any effort into album covers if they're ostensibly going to be ignored?

Most likely, the cover of The Next Day is probably supposed to represent some kind of interplay between the past and the present, or between perception and reality. I wonder if these themes are covered in the lyrics?

This is why I don't like initial listens and why I don't trust first-impressions. There's always too much to take-in.

In any case, the cover of The Next Day is not exactly unprecedented. For one thing, it can be listed alongside Earthling and certain editions of Lodger as an album on which Bowie's face doesn't appear on the cover. Similarly, the artwork of 2002's Heathen featured swathes of paint thrown against canvasses and pages torn from books. The only difference, really, is that here Bowie's sabotaging his own work rather than that of another artist.

So whilst the cover of The Next Day is hideous, it's by no means without meaning. I therefore don't think it can necessarily be described as “lazy” or “throwaway”. Just "ugly" and "unappealing".

As for the relative merits of the music? I can't wait to find out!