The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground & Nico

Love Deluxe

Sade

Impossibly lush and impossibly rich, an exercise in pure immersion.

Sade’s revelatory fourth album Love Deluxe is an exercise in pure immersion, beginning with the opening bassline of the immortal “No Ordinary Love.” Its nine songs represent rich-sounding music that, in less capable hands, would risk becoming totally overwhelming. Just as the smash debut Diamond Life arrived at the peak of quiet storm’s popularity in the mid-1980s, the slinky dub and drum machines of Love Deluxe coincided with trip-hop’s emergence in the early 1990s, sharing ostensible shelf space and musical DNA with Massive Attack’s monumental 1991 debut Blue Lines.

“[They] made so many great records, and when you go back and revisit them—pure class, pure beauty.”

Elton John

Where trip-hop is regularly associated with haze and obfuscation, Sade couldn’t be clearer, from the impossibly lush and cavernous “I Couldn’t Love You More” to the closing instrumental “Mermaid.” Singer Sade Adu has fittingly described Love Deluxe as a reflection of the search for the ultimate unattainable luxury: You can buy any kind of love, but you can’t get love deluxe. That Sade took an extended hiatus after the album’s release has only added to its weight and legend.

The Velvet Underground & Nico

A noisy, confrontational frankness that still sounds revolutionary.

When The Velvet Underground & Nico came out in early 1967, it was part of a continuum with Beat poetry, Pop Art, and French New Wave filmmaking—movements that stripped away myths about expertise and put art in the hands of whoever wanted to make it. It can be noisy and confrontational (“European Son,” “The Black Angel’s Death Song”), but it can also be sweet (“I’ll Be Your Mirror”). And even when their subject matter gets dark, they never make it too difficult to grasp (“Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for the Man”).

Brian Eno famously said that the album may not have sold many copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. He was talking about the influence of their music, of course. But he could have also been talking about the attitude with which they made it: Lou Reed and company didn’t really sound like normal people, but they didn’t sound like professionals either. And at a time when the American counterculture was drifting toward psychedelia, the Summer of Love, and vague dreams of how the world could be, they embraced a frankness that still sounds revolutionary.

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Love Deluxe

The Velvet Underground & Nico