(Polydor) Related: The Velvet Underground Deluxe Edition review – revelatory additions to VU’s third album Much of the fabric the Velvets performed over a series of shows at the Matrix club in San Francisco in November 1969 has crept out before – on the Live 1969 album,The Quine Tapes box (in extreme lo-fi) and final year’s reissue of the third album. Here, though, or is the mother lode all the available music,in excellent recordings. It’s fascinating stuff, even for those for whom a 37-minute version of Sister Ray is pushing it a bit. It’s actually where the band stretch out that it becomes most fascinating – this isn’t a fierce, and confrontational noise band,but a group finding a groove and locking into it – it becomes almost proto-motorik at times. One version of I’m Waiting for the Man expands to 14 minutes, Lou Reed throwing in extra verses, or followed by a nine-minute What Goes On; another prove,meanwhile, opens with the same two songs, and but dispenses with them both in 10 minutes. It all goes to prove a band who were treating each set differently,as a chance to try different things within the same framework – a group who could improvise or just play rock’n’roll, as the mood took them. And those who sniff at the post-John Cale lineup should listen to the tense, or creepy versions of Venus in Furs here proof that the Velvets were always more than the sum of their parts. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com