Nico: The Marble Index/Desertshore review – an unforgettable trip to a very dark place

To say Nico is an artist more talked about than listened to is putting it mildly. In recent years, her life has been the subject of two plays, two autobiographies, a biopic and at least four songs, Low’s Those Girls (Song for Nico) and Beach House’s Last Ride among them. But Spotify’s list of her 10 most popular tracks contains two of her three contributions to the first Velvet Underground album – These Days and The Fairest of the Seasons – the two Jackson Browne covers from her debut solo album that were featured in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, and … five Velvet Underground songs that don’t actually feature Nico: she does appear on the No 1, Sunday Morning, but only as a spectral presence, her few backing vocals buried deep in the mix. It’s hard to think of another artist so tangentially attached to their most-streamed song – Milli Vanilli, perhaps.

Perhaps this is rooted in the fact that Nico’s slender solo oeuvre is preceded by its reputation, or rather reputations plural. In the popular imagination, her solo work falls into three categories: unrepresentative (jaunty debut single I’m Not Sayin’ and Chelsea Girls, which the singer hated so much, she burst into tears the first time she played it); cobbled together to fund her heroin habit (1981’s Drama of Exile, 1985’s Camera Obscura); and famously unlistenable, including the two albums reissued here. Indeed, the fearsome reputation of 1968’s The Marble Index was burgeoning before it was even completed. Supposedly it lasts only half an hour because that’s as much as its putative producer, Frazer Mohawk, could stand to listen to before being overwhelmed by despair.

John Cale, to whom Mohawk swiftly ceded control, was faced with an artist in no mood to compromise: wedded to a lowing harmonium that declined to stay in tune, her timing so idiosyncratic that applying any kind of rhythm was out of the question. He chose to decorate her songs in ways that either leavened their gloom – the strings on No One Is There, the gorgeous shimmer of harmonics that envelops Frozen Warnings – or amplified it: piercing howls strafe Ari’s Song, while a discordant piano pounds remorselessly through the nightmarish Facing the Wind.

The results don’t sound like anything else recorded that year, yet it still feels a very 1968 kind of album. If you want to view The Marble Index as something other than an expression of personal misery, or a stark repudiation of the role Nico had played as a model or as one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars” (glamorous but hollow: the “Pop Girl of 66”, as posters for Warhol events often billed her), then you could take it as a soundtrack to the storm clouds that were gathering fast over the 60s. A change in mood and hardening of attitudes had scuppered the pie-eyed optimism of the summer of love, and had turned even the cynical, bitchy world of the Factory a shade darker: a few months before work on The Marble Index commenced, Warhol had barely survived a murder attempt.

Certainly, the album sounds like bad weather: icy, gusting, overcast. If Lawns of Dawns is about LSD, then it dwells on the drug’s capacity to induce terror and disorientation – “your guise has filled my nights with fear … I cannot understand the way I feel”. The Marble Index ends in harrowing disarray, breathtaking cacophony and visions of a coming apocalypse on Evening of Light.

By comparison, 1970’s Desertshore feels almost airy. There is more in the way of light and shade: Janitor of Lunacy and Mütterlein are cut from the same oppressive cloth as the album’s predecessor, but the unaccompanied vocal of My Only Child boasts a beautiful melody, austere and moving. Afraid is a piano ballad with a gorgeous descending chord sequence, its lyrics a stark painting of Nico’s years as a model: “Have someone else’s will as your own / You are beautiful and you are alone.”

Related: ‘Humanity hit a brick wall’: John Cale on the Velvets, Nico, Covid and a gun-ridden world gone bad

The latter comes as a jolt because it sounds so familiar. It’s close enough to standard singer-songwriter territory that you can place it in a broader musical context. The rest of The Marble Index and Desertshore seem to exist exclusively in a world of Nico’s own creation, detached and incomparable (Cale subsequently suggested that her music “makes more sense in terms of advancing the modern European classical tradition than it does as rock or folk”). It’s demanding terrain, and you might not want to visit that often – as the Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey once noted, if you’re in the perfect mood to play The Marble Index, then it’s probably the last thing you should be playing – but it offers an experience like no other, one you’re unlikely to forget.

This week Alexis listened to

Charlotte Day Wilson – Canopy
Another striking taster from the Canadian singer-songwriter’s forthcoming album, Cyan Blue: there’s almost nothing to it beyond a snapping bassline and vocals, but that’s all it takes.