The Raven

In the black corner, Lou Reed, middle class Syracuse kid turned chronicler of all things rotten in the Big Apple. In the other black corner, Edgar A. Poe, southern gentleman of letters relocated to New England, whose tales of the macabre housed the seeds of modern psycho-criminology. I’m only sorry Bangs isn’t around to referee this one.

And as for Lou, well, mini-musicals such as ‘The Gift’ off the second Velvets record and routines like ‘Harry’s Circumcision’ demonstrated the point where rock ‘n’ roll and lidderachure could meet, couple and raise their devil spawn in a charnel house in the ’burbs.

Thus far reviewers have been foaming at the mouth trying to describe what an ungainly and unprecedented enterprise is The Raven, but Reed has always been at his best when there’s a thread to his threnodies, from New York to Berlin.

But The Raven is not the work of an auteur; the number of heads clunking together on this thing equates to a sort of bohemian American think-tank. Essentially it’s the realisation of Reed’s 2000 Poe-try collaboration with arch-imagist Robert Wilson (who also hooked up with Tom Waits on productions of The Black Rider and Alice) for the Thalia theatre. The album was produced by all round downtown brainiac Hal Willner, the man behind the superb 1997 Poe tribute album Closed On Account Of Rabies. Furthermore, figure into the Raven equation Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi, plus musical guests Ornette Coleman and David Bowie – you have to hand it to Lou, he doesn’t go into these things half-arsed.

But heed this: you must purchase the limited edition two-CD version. Preliminary listens to the condensed single CD rendered the material gimmicky and perverse. I almost spluttered into my porridge on initial hearings of ‘Edgar Allen Poe’, the first song proper, with its glam saxophones and Rocky Horror wallop. But over the full programme, with hefty spoken word interludes to throw contextual relief on the songs, it all makes a lot more sense.

This is a penny dreadful arcade of paranoia, obsession, addiction and death – shitloads of death. Reed has taken some audacious steps with the material, not least recasting the title poem as the ravings of a coke addict (wolfishly declaimed by weird Willem).

And while this is far from his best album, neither does it make a joke of Reed’s own assertions that this is the summation of everything he’s learned so far. There are chunks of Metal Machine Music in the shock sound effects and brutal feedback dynamics. There are flashbacks to the Burroughs-on-Broadway of Berlin, with Willner filling the Bob Ezrin role, plus a revisiting of that all-time classic party pooper ‘The Bed’. There are elements of Transformer’s punk cabaret in an astonishing return to ‘Perfect Day’ sung by a strange castrato who evokes the image of a black Jeff Buckley hustling his booty on 53 & 3rd.

There’s Buscemi doing a rented tux club singer skit on ‘Broadway Song’ replete with Sands hotel horns and lines like, “Good old Poe, don’t he make you cry/Ain’t it great the way he writes about the mysteries of life”. There’s the Warholian whimsy of ‘ Balloon’ and ‘Hop Frog’. And yes, there are classic Lou tunes like ‘Burning Embers’ and ‘Call On Me’ and ‘Change’, with its unflinching examination of age.

The Raven is destined to become one of those oddities your wacky Wicca friends will produce at Halloween theme parties and ominously inquire, ‘Have you heard this?’
Don’t say you weren’t warned.