It is one of the most entrenched visions in the
rock
critic's vocabulary;
Nico
as doomed valkyrie, droning death-like through a harsh gothic monotone, a drained beauty pumping dirges from her harmonium while a voice as old as dirt hangs cobwebs round the chords. In fact she only made one album which remotely fit that bill -- this one -- and it's a symbol of its significance that even the cliche emerges as a thing of stunning beauty. Her first album following three years of rumor and speculation,
The End
was consciously designed to highlight the
of already pertinent myth. Stark, dark, bare, and frightening, the harmonium dominant even amid the splendor of
Eno
's synthesized menace,
John Cale
's childlike piano, and
Phil Manzanera
's scratchy, effects-whipped guitar, it is the howling wind upon wuthering heights, deathless secrets in airless dungeons, ancient mysteries in the guise of modern icons. Live,
took to dedicating the final cut, a sparse but heartstoppingly beautiful interpretation of the former German national anthem, to terrorist Andreas Baader, even as the song itself conjured demons of its own from an impressionable Anglo-American audience.
later admitted she intended the performance in the same spirit as
Jimi Hendrix
rendered
"Star Spangled Banner."
But
"Das Lied der Deutschen"
-- "Deutschland Uber Alles" -- has connotations which neither tribute nor parody could ever undermine. It is only in the '90s that even Germany has reclaimed the anthem for its own. In 1974, it was positively leperous. Listen without prejudice, though, and you catch
's meaning regardless, even as her voice tiptoes on the edge of childlike, all but duetting with the little girl she once was, on a song which she'd been singing since the cradle. The ghosts pack in. Former lover
Jim Morrison
haunts the stately
"You Forgot to Answer,"
a song written about the last time
saw him, in a hired limousine on the day of his death; of course he reappears in the title track, an epic recounting of
the Doors
' own
"The End,"
but blacker than even they envisioned it, an echoing maze of torchlit corridors and spectral children, and so intense that, by the time
reaches the "mother...father" passage, she is too weary even to scream. The cracked groan which emerges instead is all the more chilling for its understatement, and the musicians were as affected as the listener. The mutant
funk
coda with which the performance concludes is more than an incongruous bridge. It is the sound of the universe cracking under the pressure. But to dwell on the fear is to overlook the beauty --
, first and foremost, is an album of intimate simplicity and deceptive depths.
's voice stuns, soaring and swooping into unimagined corners. No less than
"Das Lied der Deutschen,"
both
"Valley of the Kings"
and
"It Has Not Taken Long"
make a mockery of the lazy critical complaints that she simply grumbled along in a one-note wail, while the arrangements (most of which were
's own; producer
Cale
admits he spent most of his time in the studio simply marveling) utterly rewrote even the most generous interpretation of what "
music" should sound like.
doesn't simply subvert categorization. It defies time itself. ~ Dave Thompson