The plan is to release two albums in the series per month, though the inaugural slate includes four covering a pretty wide range of styles: Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song, The Band's Northern Lights–Southern Cross, Bob Marley & the Wailers' Exodus, and The Velvet Underground & Nico.
It's that final album that is the focus of this review, not just because it's the one I personally find most appealing, but also because it's an intriguing choice to introduce an audiophile series. The Velvet Underground & Nico is unquestionably one of the most influential and prescient rock albums ever made. It's a no-punches-pulled treatise on NYC decadence created ten years before punk officially arrived. It's a brew of affected nonchalance and unfettered squall twenty years before indie rock. It's also ground-breaking as perhaps the first major lo-fi record. Andy Warhol, known more for his silk screens of soup cans than his abilities as a record producer, helmed the original sessions. MGM later brought in Tom Wilson, who'd recorded perfectly professional sounding albums for Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel, to clean up the recordings and oversee "Sunday Morning" from soup to nuts, but what had already gone down could not be undone. So The Velvet Underground's first album is a symphony of dry, distorted vocals; nails-on-a-chalkboard viola; dyspeptic guitars; and distant thumping.
Those sounds partly account for why The Velvet Underground & Nico is so influential and awesome, but they're hardly the makings of a luxurious audiophile soundscape. So the big question is how audiophiley can this album sound?
Keeping in mind we're talking about the best possible presentation of the production as it is, and not some sort of art-defiling AI revision, the Vinylphyle VU&N is stunningly authentic. Instead of homogenizing the sound in a dishonest attempt to buff away this album's integral roughness, it lets everything hang out. That means in addition to allowing any harshness or sibilance on the original tapes to exist, which is never annoying or unbearably extreme, the full presence and dynamics of the vocals and instruments are allowed to boom through as well. Listen to Lou Reed's voice on "Heroin" and "I'm Waiting for the Man". Listen to Nico's on "I'll Be Your Mirror". Listen to Mo Tucker's mallet pounded bass drum on "Heroin". Listen to the high piano quarter notes at the end of "I'm Waiting" and that great big gnarly glass-smashing noise on "European Son". They leap out of a mix that tends to sound flat and claustrophobic on other presentations. Listen to how much space swirls around the instruments of "Run, Run, Run". This Vinylphyle disc is dynamic, ambient, tonally balanced, and multi-dimensional in a way I'd never heard The Velvet Underground & Nico sound. I always thought it was a mesmerizing album. Now, for the first time, I also think it's an exciting one.
In keeping with the superb audio, the vinyl pressing is flat and quiet, and the cover is beautifully replicated with the peelable banana, just as Andy Warhol intended. Short of hopping into your time machine and heading back to 1966 NYC to check in on the original recording sessions, this is the best way you're likely to ever hear this music.
