Review: Vinyl Reissues of Nico's 'The Marble Index' and 'Desertshore'

Nico had little control over the beginning of her music career, when she sang a couple of pop songs for Andrew Oldham's Immediate label. Another Andy gave her a shotgun marriage to The Velvet Underground, with which she had nearly no creative input despite being the comely commercial face of the band. Nevertheless, her unforgettable turns on the few songs she got to sing were definitely steps in a more natural direction for Nico and her avant garde sensibilities. 

When she got to make her first solo LP a few months after The Velvet Underground & Nico was released, members of the VU (as well as future MOR superstar Jackson Browne, of all people) still provided most of the songs and instrumentation, and she ultimately expressed a distaste for the prettiness of it all. The one song Nico co-wrote on Chelsea Girl, "It was a Pleasure Then", gave a taste of her true ambitions: uncompromisingly dark, borderline queasy music seemingly designed to give her listeners a severe case of the heebie jeebies. Plus, harmonium. Lots and lots of harmonium.

Nico finally got the chance to fully express herself and her harmonium on The Marble Index. Frazier Mohawk, who co-produced the album with former-Velvet John Cale, reportedly said that he made sure it didn't push too far beyond the thirty-minute mark because he was afraid that listeners would start killing themselves if subjected to any more of her ghoulish dissonance. 

If that doesn't sound like an endorsement to you, you should probably give The Marble Index a wide berth. Indeed, it is the most nightmarish, anxiety-inducing, suffocatingly gloomy thirty-minutes-and-forty-one seconds of music I've ever heard. It's also one of the most haunting and, yes, beautiful records, too, and if you think that grey skies are infinitely more pleasant than blue ones and that Max Schreck was actually kind of dashing in his Nosferatu makeup, then The Marble Index is the record for you. 

Nico lightened up a tad for her next album, although only in patches. If The Marble Index is like an unrelentingly overcast February evening, then the economically arranged Desert Shore is more like a cloudy yet breezy morning in March. Black masses like "The Falconer" and "Mütterlein" sweep along to allow sunnier sounds like "My Only Child" and "Afraid", which could pass for a mainstream pop ballad, to intermittently shine through. 

That means Desertshore feels slightly disjointed, and that disjointedness is more pronounced when comparing it to an album as dedicated to a singular mood as The Marble Index is, but "Janitor of Lunancy" (an ode to her terrible ex-boyfriend Brian Jones), "Abschied", and "Mütterlein" are among Nico's best songs. All are certainly worthy of Index at its darkest, although none are as cacophonous as Index is at its harshest. "All That Is My Own" might be a bit too jaunty to get a place on the earlier record, but it's pretty excellent too.

Long out of print on vinyl, The Marble Index and Desert Shore are now returning thanks to the Domino Recording Company. Both albums have been remastered from the original tapes. Played against my Sundazed Records copy of The Marble Index from 2004, Domino's new master is much louder, more open, and more detailed. There is a low background thumping on "Julius Caesar" that is nearly inaudible on the Sundazed disc and quite clear on Domino's. 

With Domino's fuller volume comes a slight tendency for groove distortion to invade the peaks, although this is mostly only noticeable through headphones. Most of the distortion and sibilance audible on Domino's Marble Index is baked into the tapes and audible on the various vinyl and CD versions I've heard (I'd only previously heard Desertshore as part of the Frozen Bordeline CD-set, and its own distortions and sibilance are on there too). And whereas Sundazed's vinyl edition of The Marble Index has quite a bit of surface noise and is pressed off center, both pieces of Domino vinyl are very quiet and and well centered. They're perfectly flat too and include nice fold-out inserts with rare photos and extensive liner notes by Peter Doggett.