Lou Reed New York

This 3CD/DVD/2LP Deluxe Edition of the legendary artist’s Sire Records debut features newly remastered sound, unreleased studio and live tracks, plus the DVD debut of “The New York Album” concert video. This limited edition and exclusive bundle also comes with a cassette version of the New York album.

New York City figured so prominently in Lou Reed's music for so long that it's surprising it took him until 1989 to make an album simply called New York, a set of 14 scenes and sketches that represents the strongest, best-realized set of songs of Reed's solo career. While Reed's 1982 comeback, The Blue Mask, sometimes found him reaching for effects, New York's accumulated details and deft caricatures hit bull's-eye after bull's-eye for 57 minutes, and do so with an easy stride and striking lyrical facility.

Lou Reed - New York (2020) {Rhino–Warner Records Deluxe Edition 603497847167 rec 1989}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/44.1kHz - Digital Download -> 662 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 328 Mb | Cover | 5% repair rar
© 2020 Rhino / Warner Records | 603497847167
Rock / Contemporary Rock / Rock & Roll / Experimental

Were I a professor of rock and roll music and one to grade albums, this record would stand as the finest record I've heard in my 50+ years of listening to this stuff. It's not my emotional favorite album (that being The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle) but it's a record I listen to often, still. Each song stands on its merits and the lyrics are just brilliant; Lou was the smartest man who ever played rock and roll. It's not an easy listening album; like most of Lou's records there are some cuts that are painful to listen to, but some of the rock cuts are ear worms, most notably Dirty Boulevard which replaced Sweet Jane as Lou's signature live song. This album is like reading a really good book; the trip is a great one, and when it is done, you'll be thinking about it for a very long time.

57-track, 5-CD set of albums from the legendary singer/guitarist and founding member of the Velvet Underground. Includes NEW YORK, SONGS FOR DRELLA, MAGIC & LOSS, SET THE TWILIGHT REELING and ECSTASY, each housed in a mini LP-style card picture sleeve.

The latest in Ace Records’ Songwriters series takes the listener from a version of ‘Why Don’t You Smile Now’ from Lou Reed’s pre-Velvet Underground days through selections from the band’s albums to three from 1972’s solo “Transformer”.

In May 1965, Lou Reed was a 23-year-old staff songwriter and session musician for Pickwick Records in New York, churning out doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll “soundalike” singles to be sold in drugstores. There he was introduced to his future Velvet Underground bandmate, the Welsh-born John Cale, when the label put the two of them together for a house band called The Primitives. (They would go on to make the jokey novelty song “The Ostrich.”) Reed could write teen pop hits at a rapid clip, but his real creative focus essentially starts with this foundational document, Words & Music, May 1965, which he made with Cale and which includes the first known recordings of some of the Velvets’ most well-known songs. There’s almost nothing thematically linking his former dime-store hits-for-hire and these strands of The Velvet Underground’s underbelly-surveying DNA. But the collection (the first in a series of archival releases) does highlight the songwriting discipline and rigor that would see Reed through countless stylistic changes and a 50-plus-year career as one of America’s most important artists.

In 1972, Lou Reed was a minor cult hero to a handful of rock critics and left-of-center music fans who championed his former band, the Velvet Underground, but he was unknown to the mainstream music audience. By 1986, Reed was a rock & roll icon, widely hailed as a master songwriter and one of the founding fathers of punk, glam, noise rock, and any number of other vital rock subgenres; he even scored a few hits along the way. If you want to know what happened during those 14 years to make such a difference, the answer can be found in The RCA & Arista Album Collection, a 17-disc box set that brings together nearly all of Reed's recorded work from this period…