Nate Haduch

From star-studded guest lists to an audible influence on several generations of bands, Radiohead’s fan base has always included quite a few of their fellow rock stars. We polled dozens of notable musicians about their favorite Radiohead songs, and this is how they responded. Ed Droste (Grizzly Bear) “Let Down” (From 1997’s OK Computer) Picking […]

The fifth full-length release for the British folk singer-songwriter was self-produced.

Label: Ribbon Music

Release Date: Mar 24, 2015

Las Vegas gender- and genre-bending diva Shamir recently announced his debut full-length, Ratchet, and it seems like plenty more big looks are on the way for him. The album’s rubbery lead single “On The Regular” is now soundtracking a Google Smart Watch commercial. It’s just a coincidence that Google debuted this commercial on the same […]

Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) moves to New York to start over after escaping from a doomsday cult in this comedy originally created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock for NBC.

Premieres Mar 06, 2015

Ryley Walker is poised to hit it big. The charming Chicago singer-songwriter got some well-deserved praise for “Primrose Green,” the title track from his sophomore effort, which due out on Dead Oceans in the spring. In a new video put out by his label, he performs that song in a Brooklyn apartment for a small […]

by Megh Wright

Harris Wittels wasn't just a standup, writer/producer, and frequent podcaster — he was also one-third of the band Don't Stop or We'll Die alongside comedians Paul Rust and Michael Cassady. JASH uploaded their new music video today for "Lisa," and it features Natasha Leggero, Tig Notaro, Shelby Fero, Lauren Lapkus, Todd Glass, and tons more. "Harris was super excited for everyone to see it. The video was really fun to make and we feel it perfectly captures how much joy making music brought him," JASH says. "Our hope is it helps everyone remember Harris as we remember him— funny, goofy and lovable."

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The comedy from Will Forte and directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller is about Phil Miller (Will Forte), who is literally the last man on Earth.

Premieres Mar 01, 2015

by Megh Wright

Scott Aukerman originally hadn't planned to release the latest episode of Comedy Bang! Bang! featuring Adam Scott, Chelsea Peretti, and Harris Wittels, but with the encouragement of his friends and those who knew Wittels before his tragic death last week, Aukerman ultimately decided to share the final Wittels CBB today. Aukerman's intro to the episode is an especially tough listen; here's an excerpt from it:

So a few days ago I didn't know if I wanted to even put out a show this week or put out a show next week, or, you know, even why continue? Why keep doing this stupid show? But in the conversation we had last week at this party, Harris and I were very coincidentally talking about this very subject — just why people watch comedy, what they want when they're watching or listening to comedy, about comedy's purpose in people's lives — and I told him the story of a personal tragedy that my family had gone through over a decade ago, and the just frankly bizarre experience of two hours after it happened all of us not knowing what to do, and instead of just staring at each other we turned on the TV and there was a silly stupid sitcom on, and we all laughed a lot at it. I just found that to be very bizarre, and it got me thinking about the definition of comic relief. And he thought about that and he said "Yeah…you know, a lot of people want to do serious stuff with their comedy like Louie does with his TV show, but I just think motherfuckers wanna laugh." So that's what we're gonna keep doing.

Listen to the whole episode below, and be sure to listen through to the very end.

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by Megh Wright

Heartbreaking news: Earlier this afternoon, comedian and Parks and Recreation co-executive producer Harris Wittels was found dead in his home in Los Angeles. The exact cause of death has not yet been confirmed, but it's believed to be a drug overdose. Wittels has spoken about his struggles with sobriety many times in both his standup and podcast appearances, most notably during an episode of You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes in November.

In addition to his work on Parks and Rec, Wittels has written and produced for The Sarah Silverman Program and Eastbound & Down, and he was also the mastermind behind Humblebrag. Wittels was 30 years old.

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The SNL 40th Anniversary Special will air this Sunday. From Rolling Stone, a list of all of the regular cast members of SNL, ranked from worst to best. The worst is Robert Downey Jr. ("Making him unfunny stands as SNL's most towering achievement in terms of sucking") and the top 10 are:

10. Chevy Chase
9. Gilda Radner
8. Amy Poehler
7. Phil Hartman
6. Bill Murray
5. Dan Aykroyd
4. Mike Myers
3. Tina Fey
2. Eddie Murphy
1. John Belushi

I disagree with Norm MacDonald's placement near the bottom of the barrel...I always liked his stuff. And Dratch at #16? Was never a fan. Most of the original cast ranks too high...I would have preferred Eddie at #1 over Belushi. My favorites: Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman.

FYI, the guest list for the special is kind of incredible. So far, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Alec Baldwin, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, Kristen Wiig, Chevy Chase, Chris Rock, Dan Aykroyd, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, and about 80 other bold-faced names (Hanks, Taylor Swift, Spielberg, etc.) are all scheduled to appear. (via digg)

Tags: Saturday Night Live   TV

This time yesterday the Fifty Shades Of Grey soundtrack seemed likely to cruise to an easy #1 debut next week with projected sales of 160,000. Then Drake went and dropped If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late out of nowhere, and the mixtape/album/whatever is suddenly poised to demolish all comers. Billboard predicts the project will sell 400,000 copies by the time this week’s chart period ends Sunday night, while Hits Daily Double estimates Drake might make it all the way to 500,000. Republic Records is the parent company behind both releases, so it’s a win for them either way.

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sternutation: the act of sneezing.

While most of the world was struggling through an uneventful and inoffensive Grammys ceremony, a lucky few got to witness Sleater-Kinney take the stage for the first time in nine years last night to perform a full headlining show. The band went back to their roots, opening up their No Cities To Love tour at the Knitting Factory in Spokane, Washington, and photographer Alex Crick was there to capture the memorable event. Check out his photos above, and some video from the show below.

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Taylor Swift’s Twitter hack didn’t expose anything particularly embarrassing, but that’s OK, there’s plenty to joke about in the public record. Consider, for instance, this Vox report that Swift has trademarked the phrase “this sick beat” — as in the “Shake It Off” lyric “You could have been getting down to this sick beat” — preventing others from printing the phrase on everything from clothing to Christmas ornaments.

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From the Russian Space Agency, a video of what the sky would look like if the Sun were replaced by some other stars. It starts off with the binary star system of Alpha Centuri, but watch until the end for Polaris, which has a radius 46 times that of the Sun.

See also the view from Earth of different planets replacing the Moon and imagining Earth with Saturn's rings.

Tags: astronomy   remix   science   space   Sun   video

by Megh Wright

The wait for Tina Fey and Robert Carlock's NBC-turned-Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is almost over, and today the streaming network dropped the very first trailer, which features Ellie Kemper as a doomsday cult member-turned-New Yorker who is joined by 30 Rock alums Jane Krakowski and Tituss Burgess. All 13 episodes debut on Netflix March 6th; here's what Tina Fey said at TCA about re-editing the first season with streaming in mind:

The back half of these 13, we’ve edited them with Netflix in mind. At the very least, to not be writing toward commercial breaks and editing down to rigid network timing—a half hour [slot] on network is 21 minutes and 15 seconds [of content]. And so we’d be able to put back some jokes that were cut solely to get to that timing. That said, the tone of the show is sort of set, because it was written for network. So I don’t think it’s going to take a graphic sexual turn in season 2.

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Last year, the grizzled country-music adventurer Sturgill Simpson spent $4,000 making his great album Metamodern Sounds In Country Music and released it on his own. That album found its audience, and now Simpson is nominated for a Grammy and showing up on practically every worthwhile festival bill. He’s also touring hard; he sold out his upcoming show in Charlottesville, where I live, months ahead of time, which almost nobody does. So it’s not a tremendous surprise that Simpson is moving into the major-label universe. He is, after all, an earner. Rolling Stone reports that Simpson has inked a deal with Atlantic and that he’s already gotten to work on a new album with Metamodern Sounds producer Dave Cobb. Look for this guy to get really famous really soon.

by Phil Davidson

The one thing we do know about Reggie Watts’ replacement on IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang! is the new sidekick will be a human being.

That is all the offbeat talk show’s host and creator Scott Aukerman is willing to divulge in the wake of news that Watts, Comedy Bang! Bang!’s bandleader for the past three seasons, is leaving in March to become bandleader of the new Late Late Show with James Corden on CBS.

We’ll still have plenty of Watts and Aukerman’s hilariously awkward banter to enjoy in the first half of Comedy Bang! Bang! season 4, which premiered last week. And Aukerman promises a remarkable mid-season sendoff.

After that, who knows what’s in store? Worry not, however, as fans of the both the television show and Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast know Aukerman is consistently funny no matter who he’s working with.

I recently had the chance to chat with Aukerman about season 4, Watts’ departure, and why he decided to end his live standup show.

What can you tell me is new with season 4?

What I can tell you is they’re all new episodes for season 4. We decided to shoot all new ones for season four instead of just re-airing the early ones which cost more but we said our fans mean a lot to us and we don’t want them just watching the old episodes. I will say that much like Pinter’s Betrayal, every episode is backwards chronologically.

What is Pinter’s Betrayal?

Well, you could just look it up after the interview is over or you could just ask me right now and I’ll give you a long boring answer. Which do you choose?

Can you just give me a short answer?

It's a play.

Are you doing anything different thematically with the show or is it pretty much the same format?

The good thing about this season, and I really think it’s the best season so far that we’ve done, is we have a little more money to do it which is great because it keeps the quality increasing. We’re better at it than we ever have been. Season 3 was hurt a little bit because we had budgetary problems that we haven’t had yet in season 4.

I saw the trailer for the new season. Was that Paul Dooley I saw?

That’s Paul Dooley, yes, from Breaking Away. The master.

I love that guy.

That’s the one person you’re excited by? You’re the only guy who watched that trailer and was like, “They got Paul Dooley!”

[laughs] Well Breaking Away is one of my all-time favorites. I may not know Pinter’s Betrayal but I do know Breaking Away. It’s not often you see Paul Dooley on a comedy show these days and I think I recognized George Wendt in the trailer as well. I just kind of wondered how you go about getting guys like that on the show?

A lot of times if it’s someone we don’t know — and I had never met Paul or George…You know what?  I had met George once before when I was pretty young. I went to see a production of David Mamet’s Lakeboat, and before you ask, that’s a play.

[laughs]

I was with someone who knew someone in the cast and I got to meet everyone who was in the cast, which included Ed O’Neill and all these Chicago Mamet guys. I went to a bar with the cast afterwards and George Wendt came into the bar and everyone screamed, “Norm!” and someone just slid a beer to him and he sat down at the bar. So I’d met him once before but of course he didn’t remember who I was because I was a young kid excited just to be talking to him. But with most of the people we don’t know we reach out to our booking person and say, “Hey I think this person would be really great for the role that we have in mind” or “I’d really like to do something with George Wendt so let’s think of something to do with him.” Then you hope he says yes. It’s pretty much you just offer the role to someone. For the most part we don’t do auditions unless it’s for a tiny part for someone we don’t know. We just offer roles to people and actors love just being offered roles. Actors hate auditioning and so if you want a good actor to be in something just offer them the part and that’s a good trick if you have a TV show.

Ty Segall’s Mr. Face EP may be the world’s first playable pair of 3D glasses, but they also have, like, music on them. Imagine that! The prolific California rocker has just shared the title track from the EP and, as always, it’s shocking how many great songs he can put out in quick succession with no signs of stopping. “Mr. Face” doesn’t sound much like anything on Manipulator, but that’s to be expected for the restless artist. Listen below.

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A few months ago, we got the news that the squiggling mutant trap producer Arca was collaborating with Björk on a new album, her long-awaited follow-up to 2011′s Biophilia. According to initial reports, Arca and Björk were producing the whole thing together. But now we know that there’s at least one other producer in the fold: The Haxan Cloak, the British sorcerer who specializes in heavy, atmospheric horror-music soundscapes. If you’re trying to conjure clouds of dread, Arca and the Haxan Cloak are two very good people to call, and goddam, this new Björk album is going to be dark. As Pitchfork points out, the Haxan Cloak made the announcement on Twitter late last night. Here’s what he writes:

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What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Common? Rapper? Actor? Grammy Award winner? Furniture connoisseur? If you guessed all of the above, you technically wouldn’t be wrong! Common is hosting and serving as a judge on Spike TV’s new reality competition series, Framework, which premieres tonight. The series will feature furniture designers competing to win a cash prize and the opportunity to work for a major manufacturer. Common will sit on a panel of judges that includes two actual furniture designers. Spike TV gives the following justification for his inclusion: “Common has been on the cutting edge of trends and brings his keen eye for style and understanding of consumer desire to the competition.” Common himself puts it a little more simply: “I am the voice of the consumer.” Hmm… There’s a promo for the show below.

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incunabula: the earliest stages or first traces of anything.

From Mallory Ortberg, some reviews of children's movies penned by objectivist Ayn Rand.

"Mary Poppins"
A woman takes a job with a wealthy family without asking for money in exchange for her services. An absurd premise. Later, her employer leaves a lucrative career in banking in order to play a children's game. -No stars.

Tags: Ayn Rand   Mallory Ortberg   movies

by Megh Wright

Here's the latest installment of Comedy Bang! Bang!'s web series Reggie Makes Music featuring Friday's guests The Lonely Island, who all seem a little reluctant to take their turn on the mic but make the best of their very awkward situation. Bonus points to Reggie Watts for wearing the most adorable Christmas sweater of all time.

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In the early 2000s, Jack White was in the Upholsterers, a short-lived project with fellow Detroit musician and drummer Brian Muldoon (of the Muldoons). The duo pressed 100 copies of their second single, “Your Furniture Was Always Dead … I Was Just Afraid To Tell You,” and then hid them in furniture being reupholstered by Muldoon at the business he worked at. White and Muldoon hid these singles ten years ago, in 2004, and apparently two people have only now reported finding them. Third Man Records shared the album cover art, designed by the Detroit-based artist Gordon Newton. There’s no word yet on whether or not these singles will be re-pressed for purchase, but you should probably start tearing into your old furniture now.

by Megh Wright

The upcoming Late Late Show with James Corden just announced its band leader, and CBS couldn't have made a better choice. In an announcement today, the network revealed that Reggie Watts has officially signed on to lead the Late Late Show band when it premieres in March. According to Variety, the debut episode of Late Late Show has now been pushed to March 23rd, which hopefully means we'll get a list of more guest hosts soon.

In other Late Late Show hiring news, THR reports that Ben Winston will serve as showrunner, The Tonight Show's Rob Crabbe will serve as executive producer, Tosh.0 co-creator Mike Gibbons will serve as co-executive producer and head writer, and Sheila Rogers (Late Show) and Josie Cliff (One Night with Robbie Williams) have joined the show as producers.

UPDATE: According to an update by Scott Aukerman, Watts will leave IFC's Comedy Bang! Bang! halfway through next year: "Reggie is sticking around thru the first half of 2015, during which he have planned a very fitting goodbye for him."

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Follow @acidjacknyc

[photos courtesy of P Squared Photography]

PCPC is the daring combination of Andrew Savage and Austin Brown of Parquet Courts and members of PC Worship, bringing some of the best of both to the table. We were honored to capture this set at St. Vitus, which is their very first live show as a band. With both acts busy with their own projects — PC Worship with this year’s Social Rust, released a month before this show, Parquet Courts with the new “Parkay Courts” record — it’s impressive that the groups were able to make this pairing happen at all. But what we got was a band that felt loose and at home with their new material, their material combining Parquet’s nonchalance with the more off-kilter noise of PC Worship. The band felt a bit like a younger, less-serious Sonic Youth, making them the ideal opener for the Thurston Moore show that was to follow. A third of their set consisted of the opening number, the winding noise jam “Fell Into the Wrong Crowd”, before they got down to business with some shorter numbers, including a hard-to-recognize retooling of Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita”. The show operated more or less as a continuous single piece, and it was a thrill to watch these guys gel so effectively on their first time out.

I recorded this set in the same manner as Thurston Moore’s headlining set, with Schoeps MK4V microphones and a soundboard feed. The sound quality is outstanding. Enjoy!

Parquet Courts and PC Worship will be appearing together at Webster Hall this Thursday – try to buy tickets here if you can, or scour the Internet.

Download the full set: [MP3] | [FLAC]

Stream the full set:

PCPC
2014-10-21
St. Vitus
Brooklyn, NY USA

Exclusive download hosted at nyctaper.com
Recorded and produced by acidjack

Schoeps MK4V (LOC, A-B)>KC5>CMC6>Sound Devices USBPre2 + Soundboard>>Roland R-44 [OCM]>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (aligh, mix down, fades, limiter)>Izotope Ozone 5 (light EQ, exciter)>Audacity 2.0.5 (tracking, amplify, balance, downsample, dither)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 Fell Into the Wrong Crowd
02 I Know You
03 Human Kindness
04 Lost In the Drain
05 Carmelita [Warren Zevon]
06 Cracked Mary
07 Born Again To Be Wild

If you enjoyed this recording, please visit the Parquet Courts website, buy Sunbathing Animal here, and visit PC Worship’s bandcamp page, where you can also buy their records.

Music is a messy thing. There’s too much of it, too many genres, too many ideas, for anyone to make sense out of all of it — or even to hear all of it. The idea of imposing a narrative on 365 days of music, of making sense of a whole year, is a fool’s errand. Still, some years, stories and patterns and commonalities emerge. Trends cut across genre lines and become movements. New voices rise up and reshape the landscape in their image. Some years, you can start to feel like you’re making sense out of all of it. This isn’t one of those years.

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The Velvet Underground. This band’s eponymous 1969 release, so different from 1968’s White Light/White Heat, is the sound of a band finding clarity through subtraction. Gone was John Cale, and with him the grinding viola and most of the avant-garde leanings he brought to the forefront. Gone were — according to guitarist Sterling Morrison — all the effects pedals that allowed for the distortion and feedback so prevalent on White Light/White Heat, stolen at the New York airport as the band flew to Los Angeles to record. Gone was the Verve label, with the band moving up to parent company MGM’s main label. Gone was New York itself, and all but the last tenuous threads of its connection to Andy Warhol and The Factory. The result is the barest Velvet Underground record,…

320 kbps | 724 MB  UL | FS | UP ** FLAC

…stripped down to its skin.

All those changes, of both personal and proclivities, are immediately apparent. Album opener “Candy Says” is sung by newcomer Doug Yule, enlisted mere weeks before recording as a replacement for Cale. With his held notes and smooth, almost placid delivery, he sings like an olympic diver, barely a ripple or quaver as he rises through his range. This vocal turn is unexpected and welcoming. It’s a far cry from the titular opening salvo of the prior album. To say “Candy Says” is delicate may be understanding it; it’s a frail and skeletal doo-wop song, complete with softly reverberating doo-doo-wah backing vocals that sound like it takes all the energy the singers have to rise from a whisper to a sigh. Yule’s vocals only come to the fore again on one other track, the searching folk song “Jesus”. There his harmonies carry Reed’s lead vocal, filling in gaps and adding needed buoyancy to the beautifully brittle plea.

On the original album, “Candy Says” and “Jesus” are the bookends to the pulsing heart of side one, the trio of tracks “What Goes On”, “Some Kinda Love”, and “Pale Blue Eyes”. The jangling shuffle of “What Goes On” still feels current, for its template has yet to go out of style. Though the Velvet Underground was not the progenitor of that mode of staccato guitar playing, its rock and roll variant has proved incredibly influential. (This staccato style goes back at least as far as Steve Cropper and his work with Booker T & the MGs and on innumerable other Stax recordings.) From the Feelies and R.E.M. to Yo La Tengo and Real Estate, this style of rave-up has proved to be perennial, blooming again year after year, decade after decade.

But it isn’t just the jangle that has proved to have legs. Many artists, including several of those previously mentioned, have drawn inspiration from Lou Reed’s guitar solo. An overlay of three separate takes played simultaneously, it harkens back to the fuzz and fury of prior records; however, this has a restrained musicality to the feedback those records often lacked. It is that restraint that time and again is what defines The Velvet Underground; from instrumentation to performance, there is a comfortable control to the album.

“Some Kinda Love” is a fine example of that restraint. Simple, clean guitars, a muted, sinuous bass line, and the heartbeat of a muted cowbell accompany a more spoken than sung Lou Reed vocal. Reed, his every intake of breath audible, slides from line to line with either a sigh or a smile. To hear him laugh here is the most disconcerting sound on the album, for what is scarier than a gleeful Lou Reed? But those smiles and that laugh are but further indicators of where the Velvet Underground was in 1969. This is the sound of a band comfortable and confident in its abilities. Where once the Velvet Underground walked a knife edge of tension, there is a nary a frayed nerve on display on the whole record.

That’s especially true on the album’s most famous tune, “Pale Blue Eyes”. At heart a folk-rock song, Reed’s paean to a love gone but not sublimated is warm and comfortable like a well-worn sweatshirt. Enveloped in past memories and an elliptical, stutteringly delicate guitar line played by Sterling Morrison, Reed’s wistful, heartfelt delivery sells the earnest lyrics without ever falling into schmaltz. It’s an incredibly hard thing to do, but he and the band manage it with their newfound characteristic ease.

While side one may have the showstoppers and the songs that have entered into the canon, the second side is not without it’s own high merit. “Beginning to See the Light” is another slice of staccato R&B, with Reed’s whoops, hollers, laughs, cries, cracking pitch, and whispered asides showing the influence of Ronald Isley on songs like 1959’s “Shout” more than anything from his peers. Time and again, The Velvet Underground hearkens back to the pre-Beatles music of its youth: the late ‘50s and early ‘60s folk revival, the doo-wop and girl groups that ruled the Long Island airwaves, the gospel and R&B that thrummed through New York via Detroit, Memphis, Chicago, and elsewhere.

The muted yet booming drums that anchor “I’m Set Free” sound like nothing more than an homage to Phil Spector, as are the background “oohs” and “babys” that could be pasted from a number of Spector productions from the early ‘60s. But for all the homage, it’s the solo here that is most noteworthy. It moves in a near vacuum of sound, fluid and sinuous, a bubble of mercury that can’t quite be caught. The reverb is just enough to differentiate from everything else on the album. It’s as if by some grace it just appeared, shimmered into life, and was gone. The allusion to an illusion made real, but only for a moment.

“That’s the Story of My Life” is another momentary illusion; a jaunty ditty that feels like an album closer, stuck in the middle of the second side as a tease and palate cleanser. A sketch more than a song, it places distance between the metaphysical weight of “I’m Set Free” and the aural weight of “The Murder Mystery”, a track that feels like the last gasp of the band that once was but is no more. With Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison both reading/chanting parallel but different lyrics (panned hard left and hard right, respectively) over a rising, cresting, then repeating motif during the verses, and Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule singing overlapping choruses in a similar hard pan, “The Murder Mystery” is a nearly nine-minute experiment in muted cacophony. The lyrics are clear and easily deduced – at least when the balance is panned to one side in order to focus – and what is mostly mere wordplay when separate becomes an odd concurrence that is more than the sum of it’s parts when whole. Like waves split by a jetty, the intersections change how each is perceived, overlapping, one clear then the other, until they unite as something totally new and unfamiliar in pattern. Repetition doesn’t dull this effect; without conscious effort to screen one from the other the overlap overwhelms time and again. It’s like two guitars that sound initially dissonant but create a new melody from their intersection. How it works is the mystery.

On its two prior records, the Velvet Underground closed with arguably its most dissonant and avant-garde songs (“European Son” and “Sister Ray”, respectively). On The Velvet Underground, the band finishes not with the dissonance of “The Murder Mystery”, but perhaps its most left-field and truly unusual track, “After Hours”. Sung by Maureen Tucker, it’s a song that could best be called a mid-tempo ‘30s jazz ballad. Accompanied only by a simple bass line and an acoustic guitar, Tucker gamely steps up to the mic and gives it her awkward all. There is neither precedent nor antecedent for this in the music the Velvet Underground released in its time together. It’s sui generis, hailing from nowhere and going to the same place. It’s also an understandable fan favorite, for it embodies all the frailties and insecurities and delicate sensibilities of The Velvet Underground as a whole. “After Hours” is the perfect capstone on an album that, more than anything else the group ever recorded, wears its vulnerabilities as badges of honor.

The Velvet Underground – 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition is much more than just the single album, though it does contain three distinct mixes of the record itself. First is the “Val Valentin Mix”, which is the one referenced for the above description. Valentin was the engineer for the recordings, and his mix was the one released overseas and eventually on compact disc. Second is what became known as “The Closet Mix”, which was done by Lou Reed himself and was used for the initial vinyl release in the United States. Its nickname comes from Sterling Morrison, who said, ”I thought it sounded like it was recorded in a closet. I guess he [Lou] felt the real essence of the tracks was the lyrics.” Besides the band being pushed far to the back, a different vocal take of “Some Kinda Love” was used on “the Closet Mix”. That track also has a single guitar track instead of the two on the Valentin mix. Preference between the two versions is left to the individual; there is no definitive version, though it’s easy to see why some people side with Lou’s mix. It makes an intimate album all the more personal. However, the Valentin mix gives the band greater prominence as a whole, and the contribution of the other members is not to be underplayed. Both are worth having at hand, depending on the listener’s mood.

However, it is tough to argue that the “Promotional Mono Mix” that comprises the third disc of this set is much more than a curio. Little on this record is improved by the flattening and punchiness of late ‘60s mono; the space and subtlety of much of the record is effectively neutered. While “What Goes On” and “Beginning to See the Light” can handle the extra kick, it isn’t enough of one to be transformative. On the other hand, “The Murder Mystery” becomes incomprehensible and painful, converting carefully planned and executed stereo work into nothing but aural muck. Ultimately this mix is a curio, one that few will return to after an initial listen.

That’s far from the case with “1969 Sessions”, the recordings often discussed as the “lost” Velvet Underground album. Doug Yule puts paid to that notion by stating, “My understanding was that this was demo stuff, the beginning of the next project.” These songs, cut in various studios throughout 1969, would, after years of bootlegs, see the light of day on the two mid-‘80s compilations, VU and Another View. At that point, several songs were in an un-mixed state, or mixed in ways that were for one reason or another deemed unacceptable. Those tracks, including “I’m Sticking With You”, “I Can’t Stand It”, and “Lisa Says”, along with several others, were mixed in what was then the current taste in production; lots of extra reverb and echo, especially on the drums. Here, a modern mix has been created that does its best to replicate the sound of the 1969 mixes; or, alternately, they’ve been left as they were in 1969. Though unfamiliar—nearly 30 years of listening to the ‘80s mixes leaves a heavy imprint—the mixing engineers have succeeded spectacularly. While not a standalone album per se, they now feel of a piece and sound. As nice as it is to have these tracks collected and mixed as they are here, Yule is right that these are tentative performances and, in some cases, merely perfunctory, demos for a project that was not to be. Only one of these tracks, “Rock & Roll”, would be revisited for the next Velvet Underground album, Loaded. “1969 Sessions” is a glimpse down a road not taken.

The metaphorical road holds no weight when compared to the real one. Like most of its contemporaries, the reality of the Velvet Underground was one of constant touring. The year 1969 found the band performing short residencies in city after city; three-night stands in the cities of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Dallas, with repeated visits and single nights elsewhere in between. In the fall of 1969, the group settled on the West Coast, playing everywhere from Los Angeles to Vancouver, with multiple long stays in San Francisco. Most of those were at The Matrix, a club owned by Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane. The venue had a professional four-track booth, and many tapes recorded there have been favorites of bootleggers and record labels alike. While recordings from the Velvet Underground’s late November shows were used as the primary basis for the 1974 double-album 1969: Velvet Underground Live, it’s long been known that more recordings existed. Leaked tracks in recent years also showed that the fidelity of those recordings was better than what came out in 1974.

So the decision to release two discs worth of recordings, here titled “Live at The Matrix”, is the collector’s dream. These CDs total 18 songs in all, only six of which were on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, while “Sister Ray” appears from the audience’s perspective on Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes. Mixed and mastered from the original four-tracks, even the familiar songs have new depth and character. Reed and Morrison’s guitars are distinct and clear, and Yule’s bass and organ, while not at the level they would have been in person, are audible and not a muddy wash. Tucker’s drums sound correct, with just the right amount of punch. Lead vocals are a bit in front, backing vocals range from loud and off-key to dead-on to completely negligible.

To best hear the changes, it’s good to directly compare these mixes to prior releases. For example, “Some Kinda Love”, one of the songs repeated from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, has individual bass notes as opposed to the low rumble so familiar from the last 40 years of listening. Reed’s vocal loses some of the room presence that inconsistently creeped into the mix, and it’s far easier to discern the two separate guitar lines. But it isn’t just on the quieter tunes where the difference is audible; on somewhat louder – or at least busier – tracks like “White Light/White Heat”, the vocals burst out of the speakers, the funkiness of Yule’s approach to the bass comes to the fore, and Tucker sounds like she has more than a snare to play. On 1969: The Velvet Underground Live her cymbal hits dissolve into a trebly wash; here they snap with individual clarity, and don’t bleed out atop the mix.

The improvement over the seven previously released tracks is one thing, but the treasure here is the 11 unreleased performances. “I Can’t Stand It Anymore”, complete with a disturbingly funny introduction from Reed; Tucker’s reluctant showpiece “After Hours”; “I’m Waiting For The Man”, “Venus In Furs” “There She Goes Again” and “Heroin” from the first album, all recast via the prism of the third. At this point in time, “Live at The Matrix” stands as the definitive live document of the Velvet Underground.

The Velvet Underground is a band shrouded in myth, in story, and in history unrelated to the music it created. It’s hard to approach that music without all of the baggage associated with it, but immersion is a great way to make it happen. Live in the over five hours of music this set contains for a few weeks. Enjoy the differences, both obvious and subtle, in the Valentin and Closet mixes; try and get through the mono mix of “The Murder Mystery”; wonder at what could have been if the band had kept working on “Coney Island Steeplechase” and “Lisa Says”; spend the late nights listening to The Matrix recordings, and hear a band in peak form, listening to each other, stretching and exploring through 36+ minutes of “Sister Ray”. Few bands ever had a year like the Velvet Underground did in 1969. Even fewer have a set that documents a year like that as beautifully as this one.

CD 1: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (“The Val Valentin Mix”)

1. CANDY SAYS
2. WHAT GOES ON
3. SOME KINDA LOVE
4. PALE BLUE EYES
5. JESUS
6. BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT
7. I’M SET FREE
8. THAT’S THE STORY OF MY LIFE
9. THE MURDER MYSTERY
10. AFTER HOURS

CD 2: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (“The Closet Mix”)

1. CANDY SAYS
2. WHAT GOES ON
3. SOME KINDA LOVE
4. PALE BLUE EYES
5. JESUS
6. BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT
7. I’M SET FREE
8. THAT’S THE STORY OF MY LIFE
9. THE MURDER MYSTERY
10. AFTER HOURS
11. BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT (alternate “Closet Mix”)

CD 3: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (“Promotional Mono Mix”)

1. CANDY SAYS
2. WHAT GOES ON
3. SOME KINDA LOVE
4. PALE BLUE EYES
5. JESUS
6. BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT
7. I’M SET FREE
8. THAT’S THE STORY OF MY LIFE
9. THE MURDER MYSTERY
10. AFTER HOURS
11. WHAT GOES ON (Mono Single Version)
12. JESUS (Mono Single Version)

CD 4: 1969 SESSIONS

1. FOGGY NOTION (original 1969 mix) *
2. ONE OF THESE DAYS (new 2014 mix) *
3. LISA SAYS (new 2014 mix) *
4. I’M STICKING WITH YOU (original 1969 mix) *
5. ANDY’S CHEST (original 1969 mix) *
6. CONEY ISLAND STEEPLECHASE (new 2014 mix)*
7. OCEAN (original 1969 mix)
8. I CAN’T STAND IT (new 2014 mix) *
9. SHE’S MY BEST FRIEND (original 1969 mix) *
10. WE’RE GONNA HAVE A REAL GOOD TIME TOGETHER (new 2014 mix) *
11. I’M GONNA MOVE RIGHT IN (original 1969 mix)
12. FERRYBOAT BILL (original 1969 mix)
13. ROCK & ROLL (original 1969 mix)
14. RIDE INTO THE SUN (new 2014 mix) *

* previously unreleased mixes

CD 5: LIVE AT THE MATRIX – November 26 & 27, 1969 (Part 1)

1. I’M WAITING FOR THE MAN *
2. WHAT GOES ON *
3. SOME KINDA LOVE **
4. OVER YOU *
5. WE’RE GONNA HAVE A REAL GOOD TIME TOGETHER *
6. BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT **
7. LISA SAYS **
8. ROCK & ROLL **
9. PALE BLUE EYES *
10. I CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE *
11. VENUS IN FURS *
12. THERE SHE GOES AGAIN *

CD 6: LIVE AT THE MATRIX – November 26 & 27, 1969 (Part 2)

1. SISTER RAY ***
2. HEROIN *
3. WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT **
4. I’M SET FREE *
5. AFTER HOURS *
6. SWEET JANE **

All mixes previously unreleased.

* previously unreleased performance

** different source mix of this performance appears on 1969: The Velvet Underground Live

*** different source mix of this performance appears on The Quine Tapes Box Set