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The Classic Years

Nico - The Classic Years Audio CD

A fair review of the Nico "The Classic Years" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Nico reviews here, or go back to the Nico tabs.

Band: Nico
Title: The Classic Years
Rating:

Release Date: 1998-09-15
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: I'm Not Saying 2: Last Mile 3: I'll Be Your Mirror - Nico, The Velvet Underground 4: Femme Fatale - Nico, The Velvet Underground 5: All Tomorrow's Parties [Single Version] - Nico, The Velvet Underground 6: Fairest of the Seasons 7: These Days 8: Little Sister 9: Chelsea Girls 10: No One Is There 11: Ari's Song 12: Frozen Warnings 13: Nibelungen 14: Janitor of Lunacy 15: Abschied 16: Afraid 17: Secret Side 18: You Forgot to Answer 19: End

Nico wafers
At the time, she was. Nico, the German chanteuse, recorded with now considered seminal rock faves, Velvet Underground in the late 1960's and had the deep uninterested vocals that seem so decadent and thrilling in the re-evaluation. at best, thought of as an Andy Warhol experiment and tossed aside like all tomorrows parties.
This CD is a fine rebuke to those who confuse her life with her art.
Her breathy, dramatic readings, (can't quite call it singing), are evocative and sensuous in a way that would influence such fans as Jane Oliver, latter day Marianne Faithfull, and Diana Krall.
Best on this CD is the Jackson Browne "These Days", the VU clips, and the few songs from her weirdly romantic solo LP, "Chelsea Girl", esp. the Lou Reed title song. .

You are beautiful and you are alone
Not an insurmountable obstacle, but one requiring special sensitivity in material and production. Imagine the center of the song is a singer who cannot sing. Often it's here and worth the effort to listen - a sound rarified and lunar.

Inelegant and primitive, Nico sounds best when supported by baroquefolk violins. (There's no dialectic when the VU backs her. ) She gets an oblique, decomposing cabaret vibe going - it's despairing but never pretentious.

Marlene Dietrich doing Tom Waits - only much more glacial.

the beautiful and the damned
Were it not for the valiant efforts of Danny Fields after the break-up of the original Velvet Underground, and others along the way, who really heard her voice - the tragic majesty of that voice - long before the rest of us - perhaps even this anthology would not be available to us. Nico is the most under-rated female vocalist in recording history. As others have noted, altho we get a solid compilation here - there are some notable exceptions. One wishes someone would issue "Behind the Iron Curtain" on CD. With all the junk out on CD today, is it really that difficult to re-release one of the great masterpieces of this unsurpassed diva? Nico's rendering of "My Funny Valentine" is in my opinion the greatest of all time - what I listen to when I really want to cry to music.

Classic
In her solo career, Nico released some of the best music in all of pop-dom, full of despair, darkness and beauty. She was the Velvet Underground's tambourine-shaking chanteuse, an influence on punk and goth, and the dark side to the vast expanse of pop music.

"The Classic Years" is an excellent compilation of Nico's best. It's a bit of a surprise to hear it open with the bouncy melody of the Gordon Lightfoot cover "I'm Not Saying," with Nico doing her best to keep up. Her thick vocals seem more appropriate in "The Last Mile," a stripped-down guitar ballad.

Then we venture into VU territory, with songs that Nico did on the one album where she performed. "All Tomorrow's Parties" is slow, stately and rich, while "Femme Fatale" is a light, sharp song with a tambourine, and "I'll Be Your Mirror" is an exquisite, delicate little ballad. These are among Nico's best songs.

But things remain exquisite in her following solo songs, which stray away from typical pop rhythms, and the gritty, unpolished sound that the Velvet Underground made famous. Instead we have the darkly erotic cover of the Doors' "The End," the sensuous "Chelsea Girls," and the eerie, haunting "No One Is There. "

"The Classic Years" is in more or less chronological order -- it starts off with her first single, recorded for Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, goes into her Velvet Underground Roots, and finishes with her solo pop career. Nico died in 1988 in a car accident, but had she lived, it would be easy to imagine that she would be just as much a legend today.

And away from English ubermanagers and American alt-bands, Nico's true musical style starts to shine through. It's more European in style: stately, polished, dark and rich as mahogany. In those songs, Nico seems most as home, singing almost cheerfully about isolation and death.

In technical terms her singing is not great -- deep, thick, heavily accented and monotone. But she's strange compelling, just because her voice is so unusual. The first song is the only one where she doesn't sound good -- uptempo made her sound artificially cheerful. The rest of the time, she stays slow and meditative.

Even today, Nico is a much underrated artist. But "The Classic Years" show her off at her best, with most of her best songs grouped as one album.

Roots of Goth
Over half of this compilation is drawn from The Marble Index, Desertshore and The End, which means lots of long drawn out harmonium chords and Nico's Teutonic junkie poetry, with old VU pal John Cale's sporadic attempts to inject some semblence of order to the proceedings. While I love the Velvet Underground, I'll admit I've never been a fan of Nico's proto-goth solo career. Goth rockers may owe Nico an enormous debt, it's just not this reviewer's cup of tea although I'll admit that when it works, as on "Janitor of Lunacy," the results can be pretty awesome. Too often though, the result is something like the endless, pointless and unlistenable version of The Door's "The End. "

The first half of this compilation unearths some rarities for hardcore collectors and provides some historical interest. The 1965 oddball single "I'm Not Sayin'" was written and produced by Stones producer Andrew Loog-Oldham, while the b-side, "The last Mile" was co-written, arranged and produced by none other than Jimmy Page, who is said to have played on the sessions as well. The rarely heard single version of the Velvet's "All Tomorrows Parties" is very cool to have too.

The collection is rounded out by four songs from her solo debut Chelsea Girl, two each by Jackson Browne and Lou Reed.

I would recommend this CD to anyone wanting to check out the roots of goth, as well as hardcore fans of Lightfoot, Browne, Cale, Reed, Oldham/Stones or Page/Zep who want some rarities for their collections. And of course Nico fans, who probably own this already anyways.

Richard Witts Nico bio "Life and Lies of an Icon" makes interesting companionship reading.

You can see a complete list of all Nico discography, or go back to the Nico tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.