Pascal Comelade, Ramón Prats, Lee Ranaldo
Velvet Serenade
GERMANY STAUBGOLD 169 / COUGOUYOU MUSIC 22 CD / LP (2023)
That’s right, it’s a set of cover versions of Velvet Underground tunes and songs played by a “dream team” of avant musicians…Pascal Comelade is a French hero of avant-garde composition, keyboard and synth music since 1980, not just with his amazing compositions but his own distinctive take on synth-pop or “cold wave” – his 1982 Fall Of Saigon project is required listening for any self-respecting post-punk student. Lee Ranaldo’s avant credentials hardly need amplifying either, although my own memory of Sonic Youth is that they wisely steered clear of cover versions for the most part, preferring to push buttons in other imaginative ways to evoke every aspect of psychedelic rock from Charles Manson to The Grateful Dead. Drummer Ramón Prats comes to us from The Voodoo Children Collective and numerous other projects, and he may be here to represent the Spanish arm of this project (along with writer Ignacio Julià, about whom more shortly).
At one stage I thought it was considered bad form, if not taboo, to attempt to improve on The Velvet Underground back catalogue, but that was before the group’s ill-advised reformation in 1993 when Lou Reed himself seemed intent on turning his own legend into a karaoke-styled cabaret version of the real thing. After that watershed, anything goes, I suppose. In 2023 (when Velvet Serenade was released) this record may not only be admissible to the high courts of music justice, but it may even add something to our understanding of the original corpus – at least, that’s the plan. The trio perform six cuts – three of them come from the first album and two of them were originally sung by Nico. There’s also ‘What Goes On’ and ‘Ocean’, two exemplary pieces if you see the Velvets as practitioners of long-form mesmerising trance rock, which is why it’s a shame our modern trio did not opt to cover ‘Sister Ray’.
The CD has index tracks, but plays back as a continuous performance, which is very much in its favour, and after a rather tentative start they warm to their task by track three, injecting more swagger and noise into the equation. Indeed it’s about this point – midway into their version of ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ – that the American of the group starts to wail his vocal input and get a shade more crazy on the axe, although the latter is boosted I think with the use of effects pedals that that can scramble normality and extend the player’s ideas into audio fireworks, rather than the radical, extreme hammering and detuning techniques that Sonic Youth used in the 1980s (along with objects inserted into the neck). Meanwhile, the French pianist – arguably reincarnating himself in the John Cale role, in particular the side of John Cale that picked up ideas from La Monte Young – is managing to find more invention, melody, intervals and opportunities in the original source material than you would have thought possible. And speaking of John Cale, that version of ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ which so tentatively opens the LP, reminds us of Cale’s arrangements for Nico’s The Marble Index – skeletal, disjointed, fit for setting the scene for intense psycho-drama.
However, after two up-tempo numbers, the trio decide to follow the more introspective and mysterious acoustic-ish side of VU for remainder of LP, ending with ‘Ocean’ and ‘Femme Fatale’. Both versions disappoint; ‘Ocean’ misses the gothic, family-curse subtext of the original in favour of something approaching a mild backache, and ‘Femme Fatale’ even sacrifices the lyrics, thus losing their one chance to make good on Reed’s no-nonsense advice to lonely young men, in favour of a daintified, halting attempt at rethinking the melody. So far, not great – for one thing, the purist in me is slightly irked by the very ordinary drumming by Prats on this record, which is the opposite of the perfect stripped-down simplicity of Mo Tucker, and by the vocal phrasing of Lee Ranaldo when he interprets the lyrics in his own unique way. But we must respect the fact that this record is an attempt to “relive” the VU, and is “a non-nostalgic reinvention of a musical legacy that takes an influential past into the future”.
The other dimension to this release is the concept of Catalan writer and poet Ignacio Julià. This fellow is uniquely qualified to throw his beret into the arena – he is one of a small number of rock journalists who has interviewed all the members of The Velvet Underground (since 1978 onwards), and recently completed a book Linger On: The Velvet Underground which assembles all his relevant articles; plus he has form in the area, as founder of the magazine Ruta 66 in 1984. Today’s record could be regarded as an extension of the book, an attempt to articulate some of the ideas about the music expressed by Ignacio Julià in his words. One of these is what he diplomatically calls the “creative tension” between Cale and Reed, a quality which I think most long-term fans of this band are already aware of, and if they’re not they should take a listen to side two of White Light White Heat, where the two mavericks pretty much explode in a rage of ego-fuelled tension and do everything but engage in fisticuffs, and it’s all documented on tape.
This leads us to my main bone of contention with this record – it has virtually none of that creative tension, and falls far short of delivering even the basic elements of our cherished VU moments – no feedback, no attitude, no radical experimentation, no sense of flirting with danger, such as drugs, fetishism, violence, and none of the defiant sneer at normal society. Even the basic rock drive is missing somewhere. I’ll admit we get some interesting variations on familiar VU themes here, but with a band of this stature don’t we deserve something a bit more than that? Still, my respect for the players here remains intact, and perhaps we can learn to regard this oddity as something more than an interesting gloss on the history of underground rock. (28 APR 2023)