By Emily Hatch
Five years (to the date!) of its happening, we are blessed with this: the official release of the live show of love from The Feelies for the Velvet Underground. Some Kinda Love: Performing The Music Of The Velvet Underground was recorded on October 13, 2018, at the White Eagle in Jersey City (home of the famed and most righteous WFMU) and is out now via Bar/None. You get this bundle of kaPOW rolling, propelling energy tribute that makes it -- hellooooo, long distance -- truly the next best thing to having been there.
You've always heard the Velvets luv in the Feelies, and you might have actually known about it for real, but here they are, full-frontal guitars and jangle-tones and brilliant keys and sub rosa bass and that Moe-metronomic drumming, and those chord changes that establish that foundational oooo, New York City back then.-vibe.
You can geek out elsewhere and Google deets on each Velvets tune/album/lineup/date (as I did, before snapping out of it so I could finish this...except to say these New Jersey heroes toured with Lou Reed and covered "What Goes On" in a MOST spectacular faithful-yet-Feelies fashion on 1988's Only Life). Or, you can just play this perfectly sequenced set. Picture the show by the track listing: You're going to start on "Sunday Morning", the brightness of the day temporarily blunting life's bleak undertones, but by later in the day you'll have ripped into speedy excess ("White Light/White Heat"; hey, seriously, has anyone ever translated drug experiences so directly into music as Lou Reed?), then move through some kind of thoughtful soul-processing comedown (wait until you hear their "All Tomorrow's Parties"), and then you're going to pull it all back together and go full-bore tenacity (no spoilers for this part!) and then...coda out. Here with a choral, soaring, guitars-in-counterpoint, Eric and Duane–worthy, file out of church, GORGEOUS "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'". Because life doesn't get more resigned and blessed-are-the-beautiful-meek-in-adversity than that. (It's like Sticky Fingers ending with "Moonlight Mile". It's like a whole mess of blues songs.)
The best double albums and shows are, for me, largely the ol' sonata/classical-music form of introduction, exposition, development, and recapitulation. (And sometimes coda; Hey, I grew up with piano!) It's a brilliant pattern for experience in music. And literature. And a day and a life. So, yeah, IMO, the beauty of The Velvet Underground and The Feelies? Correct me if I'm wrong, but they're not so many chords, eh? (This is where I feel obligated to insert that myth-making Lou Reed quote about how "One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.")
It's about the SOUL of it, maaaan. You feel that in this. So, get this, and get that. For Lou, I could one-chord a review with what a friend wrote back to me about this today: "The Feelies doing VU??? Are you kidding me? I need this!"
Some Kinda Love: Performing The Music Of The Velvet Underground by The Feelies is out now via Bar/None Records.
[Photo: Bar/None Records]