It is one of the most entrenched visions in the rock critic's vocabulary:
Nico as doomed Valkyrie, droning death-like through a harsh gothic monotone, a drained beauty pumping dirges from her harmonium while a voice as old as dirt hangs cobwebs 'round the chords. In fact she only made one album which remotely fit that bill -- this one -- and it's a symbol of its significance that even the cliché emerges as a thing of stunning beauty. Her first album following three years of rumor and speculation,
The End, was consciously designed to highlight the
Nico of already pertinent myth. Stark, dark, bare, and frightening, the harmonium is dominant even amid the splendor of
Eno's synthesized menace,
John Cale's child-like piano, and
Phil Manzanera's scratchy, effects-whipped guitar; it is the howling wind upon wuthering heights, deathless secrets in airless dungeons, ancient mysteries in the guise of modern icons. Former lover
Jim Morrison haunts the stately "You Forgot to Answer," a song written about the last time
Nico saw him, in a hired limousine on the day of his death; of course he reappears in the title track, an epic recounting of the
Doors' own "The End," but blacker than even they envisioned it, an echoing maze of torch-lit corridors and spectral children, and so intense that, by the time
Nico reaches the "mother...father" passage, she is too weary even to scream. The cracked groan which emerges instead is all the more chilling for its understatement, and the musicians were as affected as the listener. But to dwell on the fear is to overlook the beauty --
The End, first and foremost, is an album of intimate simplicity and deceptive depths. [The 2012 deluxe version adds a 49-minute bonus disc to the package. Included are two Peel Sessions from 1971 and 1974, respectively, a pair of cuts from an Old Grey Whistle Test performance in 1975, and a pair of live cuts from the Rainbow Theater in 1974. All nine of these cuts are previously unreleased. All but one of these nine tracks are performances from
The End, but the version of "Janitor of Lunacy" is well worth the price all by itself. All of the tracks feature
Nico accompanied only by her harmonium. Stunning.] ~ Dave Thompson & Thom Jurek