The Velvet Underground – ‘Loaded’
New York City has a habit of hatching the future of music. I suppose if you can’t write inventively in a place where you can exit the pastoral beauty of Central Park to be greeted immediately by the sight of a naked man vomiting in front of a millionaire-chocked skyscraper, then where can you? Energised by the vitality of the city, the music of New York has a visceral edge. With Loaded, The Velvet Underground deliver perhaps the definitive Big Apple album, and one of the greatest indie efforts of all time for that matter.
Beginning with a swampy jangle that sounds like the sonic version of the mirage that the hot sun wafts up from sweltering city roads, ‘Who Loves the Sun’ is a sweet handshake that celebrates summer while wallowing in the self-pity of break-up blues. It is a fine and dandy ditty that goes down as well as ice cream on a sunny day (despite the dower sentiment), but the pillow-propped dreaminess of this lilting opener is merely a starter to welcome you into the world of Loaded.
Once more, ‘Sweet Jane’ doesn’t just begin, but it emerges from yet another jangly mirage, as though the band are brushing against wind-chimes as they fish blindly in the rock ‘n’ roll ether only to emerge with one of the mightiest riffs in the rocking sea. ‘Sweet Jane’ is a blast that swaggers with such coolness that you forget all about musicology as you listen, the whirling vinyl disappears from the corner of the room, and the track simply becomes an aura of atmosphere that puts a bit of pep in your step and makes it impossible for you to merely sit and listen to the music… in the best possible way.
And that is where the album truly begins. If ‘Who Loves the Sun’ pleasantly parts the curtains, then ‘Sweet Jane’ is the start of a bright new day as you step out onto the streets of Lou Reed’s New York. From thereon, the album journeys you through a buzzing hive of humanity distilled into an adrenaline shot of indie rock. With ‘Sweet Jane’, ‘Rock & Roll’ and ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin”, that journey through the sultry side of town happens upon three of the genre’s finest tracks. All three offering anthemic upswells in this otherwise laidback and pretty album, with the exception of the punky growl that howls from ‘Head Held High’.
They say no beauty can exist without the obverse of ugliness; Loaded exhibits that perfectly, sometimes within the same song. Like Brigette Bardot with dirty fingernails and a pretty but scuffed summer dress, songbirds pleasantly pecking at a fly-tipped heap of trash, a junkie setting up a shot with a twist of lemon, or flowers blooming out from the cracks in an abandoned piece of brutalist architecture, the mix of prettiness and dissonance, sweet melody and scathing prose, angst, longing, love and joy all serve to only heighten the other making for a bittersweet, beautiful encapsulation filled with thrilling subversions throughout.
Above all, the album has its own sense of atmosphere. It might be a mishmash of themes with divergent sounds scattered throughout, but it occupies a space in the psyche like the whiff of a scent that takes you back to the past, this puts you in a cinematic world filled with your own corroborations of summer, sticky streets, dirty ankles and rock ‘n’ roll dreams. Loaded is not just perhaps The Velvet Underground’s greatest albums, but one of the greatest albums, period. A sweet slice of what it means to be young, alive and adrift in the summer in the city.
