LUNA / LOW METRO, MAY 6
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The band’s third, eponymous album, its first without Cale, proved to be the most musically prescient and reverberating. The album cover is an unpretentious, almost relaxed shot of the band reclining in a living room; correspondingly, while Reed’s lyrical motifs could never be called mundane, his themes on this record are markedly less out there than on the band’s preceding albums. But the true landmark achievement of The Velvet Underground, as I see it, is its relentless, hypnotic guitar work. Reed, the ultimate scrappy guitarist, along with Cale replacement Doug Yule, left technical flash behind for mind-warping, mesmerizing bouts of Herculean strumming–extremely repetitive three-chord cycles whose highly infectious grooves suck the receptive listener into a celebratory and liberating bliss. Long before the mechanistic relentlessness of techno started transporting ravers into hallucinogenic realms of higher understanding, Velvet Underground strumfests were sending listeners into metaphysical frenzies. The band had experimented with this kind of sound previously, particularly on White Light/White Heat, but the anarchic presence of the overly theoretical Cale usually sullied or derailed the process. On the third album–with irresistible chunks of aural hypnosis like “What Goes On” and “Beginning to See the Light”–nothing stopped the wheels from spinning round and round and round.
After splitting off from his Galaxie 500 compatriots in 1991–the other two went on to record under the name Damon & Naomi and have just turned up in a band called Magic Hour–Wareham started a new outfit, first called Luna2, then, thankfully, just Luna. The drummer, appropriately enough, is the Feelies’ Stanley Demeski–a master at holding patterns and supporting the guitar groove. Former Chills bassist Justin Harwood and newly added second guitarist Sean Eden fill out the band. Not surprisingly, the strum is the thing for Luna. While the band’s 1992 debut, Lunapark, drew on a variety of effects-aided guitar textures, the new Bewitched (both albums are on Elektra) actually strips things down, cleaning up the guitar sound and offering a more structurally homogeneous collection of songs. With genuine VU alum Sterling Morrison sitting in on a couple of songs, Bewitched finds Luna fully dedicating itself to one of the Velvets’ many ideals and finding that just as with modern medicine, specialization is the key.
