What's so striking about this virtuosity of mood is that it seems completely sincere from the first second, and knowing Nico's troubled life, this convincing defeatism pulls you right into her personal hell. What follows is the all-vocal 'My Only Child', a beautiful chorale which adds a lighter atmosphere to the tension of the album, only to be interrupted sometimes by a foreboding electronic sustained note. With the deep, droning harmonium minor triads arpeggiating underneath, you feel like her vision of hope might be even gloomier than her vision of life.Ī track like 'The Falconer' is a Schubert-infused Lied filled with harmonium gloom, classical piano lightness and an alternative rock bass banging each few measures. This is just the first in a whole bunch of negatively connotated words she orders this janitor to bring on to her and it sends shivers down your spine as directly, in the very first line of the album, you feel as if she's asking for death yet for him to 'bring hope to them and me'. "Janitor of Lunacy, paralyze my infancy" she begins. Her voice is a mist horn with a deep accent and is mixed as to fill a whole space with gloom. Nico, especially on Desertshore, adheres to this very definition of gothicism: lingering modal melodies on top of her droning harmonium transport you into the very origins of much of our folklore: death. A horn piercing through the darkness, a Dies Irae. Medievalism, droning organs echoing in a grotesque cathedral. A very, very different subculture from what the etymology of the word would suggest.
DESERTSHORE foreran the darkest mood of new wave music and genres like gothic-rock, and because of this it’s just groundbreaking, a landmark in all music history. In 2007 Warner Music released an amazing remastered 2cd set, including THE MARBLE INDEX as well.Review Summary: Death and gloom are omnipresent on Nico's very intimate harmonium-infused record and yet its staggering beauty makes it an absolute classic.
All traces are important and make a great mirror of the soul: from the omens of The Falconer, to Afraid’s touching beauty, to the eerie atmospheres of Le Petit Chevalier, Abschied’s grandeur, the folly of Mutterlein and All That Is My Own and so on. Her hieratic singing is perpetually enshrouded by the sound of viola and harmonium, and makes the entire album something that goes beyond the musical territories, turning grief into holy. It opens with the invocation of the Janitor of Lunacy, mystical figure between our world and the “desertshore”: partly Wagnerian witch, partly goddess at the foot of her abbey, Nico brands her sibylline prophecies on dead leaves and lets them fly with the wind, while music flows relentlessly as magma. The album is produced by John Cale and is more melodic and less sour than the previous THE MARBLE INDEX (1968). Nico, Andy Warhol’s muse and The Velvet Underground’s chanteuse) released DESERTSHORE, her masterpiece and one of the Twentieth Century works of Art.
In 1970, German vocalist Christa Paeffgen (a.k.a.
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