Lou Reed
Ecstasy (Reprise)
The spare and halting guitar that kicks off Ecstasy is like a crash in the middle of the night — a jarring awakening that demands your full attention. Before letting you slide back into unconsciousness, opening track “Paranoia Key of E,” a stripped-back rock song built on a basic riff and Reed’s signature sing-speak, builds a melody and momentum that take you back over a decade to New York, his landmark solo album of 1989. Lurching into the grinding “Mystic Child,” then breaking into the R&B saunter of “Mad,” Reed once again repopulates the city of legend that he as much as anyone has created, filling it with the hopeless and the beaten, the soiled geniuses and addict savants that have made his best work brilliant. His words retain their precision and bite, holding back nothing in their emotional outpouring and social commentary, yet restraining from the personal communiqués and even outright meanness of some songs on his previous release, 1996’s Set the Twilight Reeling. Drummer Tony “Thunder” Smith and bassist Fernando Saunders are still with Reed from Twilight, but instead of Reed playing all the guitars again, Mike Rathke has returned from the New York days, and together the foursome produce rock music as good as almost anything in Reed’s immense archives. The title track is quiet and sultry, a cello’s wail speaking the voice of the New York night; “Modern Dance” and “Rock Minuet” offer poetic wisdom and big payoffs in the choruses. “Turning Time Around” slows down a bit, and “Tatters” is something of a lull, but only in relation to the rest of the album. Whereas Twilight seemed hasty, often ill-conceived, there is an air of meticulosity about Ecstasy, as if its author understands the import of what’s being said and has taken measures to ensure it’s said right. Even, or especially, when it comes to the album’s opus, “Like a Possum,” a near 20-minute exercise in feedback and distortion that hurtles the listener back to the days of “Heroin” and “Street Hassle.” The song is a collision of noise and poetry that finds meaning in the midpoint between Metal Machine Music and Magic and Loss; it’s gorgeous and scary, wandering wide-eyed through the underbelly of the city Reed has written into mythology. The album, due on Tuesday, closes on the anthemic “Big Sky,” a sprawling rocker that offers as hopeful a jumping-off point as Reed has ever allowed. With the Velvet Underground ancient history and a fully realized solo career behind him already, Lou Reed is still capable of reinventing himself and turning out an album as masterfully conceived, as representative of his individual vision and voice, and as relevant as Ecstasy.
This article appears in March 31 • 2000.