Album Review: The Agony of Ecstasy

Dear Mr. Reed, could you please record another album just to prove that my favorite rock musician can still kick Oasis's ass? I promise to love it and cherish it just like everything else you've ever done.

That was me a year ago. And then I get Ecstasy lying on my desk after months of anticipation, and what's staring at me is a picture of Lou Reed's face (mind you, he's around 58 by my calculations, and it shows) and what looks like Darth Maul's light saber coming out of his neck on both sides. So I do the obvious thing and stick the album on. And almost instantly it hits me. The problem isn't that this is a bad album-it really isn't -but that the best thing I can say about it is that it's a typical Lou Reed album. This means, first off, that the album's pretty damn good. The music rocks where it needs to and slows down most of the time with some soothing guitar distortion. And the lyrics sometimes are razor sharp, the sort of brilliant poetry that Reed's always done (take, for instance, "In the mystic morning where the river meets/The hurdy-gurdy of the hip-hop beat," from "Mystic Child"). Most of the songs deal with Lou Reed's long defunct marriage and the emotion does shine through, anger and sadness and helplessness reflected through the sparse chords. But then there's the other stuff, the stuff that goes "Smoking crack with a downtown flirt/Shooting and coming 'til it hurts" (from "Like a Possum"). And there's a lot of it.

What made Lou Reed famous was the work he did with Velvet Underground, the music that's influenced almost every single band that now goes under the "alternative" label. And even after the band put away the instruments, Reed continued writing songs that were relevant, more penetrating than broken glass, and so very dangerously subversive. Too bad that the subversion doesn't work here. The drugs and sex lyrics just aren't shocking any more, and they aren't sharp, either. They're just the stuff Lou Reed used to do well. "I do Lou Reed better than anybody," he once announced at a concert, and finally that just isn't true because Lou Reed never parodied Lou Reed without trying to. It still sounds good, but there's something sad about listening to him playing an 18-minute song with only one chord now, 30 years after he convinced everyone else to play that way.

There's one instrumental on the album, and it sounds as sublime as anything I've heard, but then there are the other songs where it sounds like Reed's sampling himself. When I put on the album I knew I'd heard these songs before; that's because they sound just like his '80s albums, except now maybe with more pathos but less energy, less dexterity. In the end this album just creates nostalgia for the '70s, when this album would've sounded more fresh and brilliant than anything else you were supposed to hide from your parents.