'The Velvet Underground And Nico' by The Velvet Underground and Nico

The first album on this list to be dramatically out of sequence. This is incorrectly filed on my mp3 player as 'Andy Warhol', so it appears under A instead of V. Still, I've listened to it, aNnd here it is.

I bought this a few years back, incredibly cheap in an HMV sale. Not because I knew I wanted it, or I'd heard it before, simply because I knew that the Velvet Underground had been a big influence, directly or indirectly, on lots of bands I did like. It was an album I felt I should have.

Since then, it's languished on the shelf, pretty much unlistened to. Listening to it now reminds me why. Bits of it have a certain rough charm - 'Sunday Morning' sounds like a primitive Mercury Rev, 'Femme Fatale' works well as a sort of Bacharach-pastiche, and 'All Tomorrow's Parties' has a certain hypnotic quality. Sadly, too much of the album fails to match this, inhabiting the spectrum somewhere between 'hard work' and 'unlistenable'. Many of those artists that owe a debt of gratitude to the Velvet Underground have taken the ideas on display here and improved on them massively. For that, we can all be thankful