Lester Bangs, the greatest rock critic who ever lived, once wrote of Nico’s music:
“I don’t know if I would classify it as oppressive or depressing, but I do know that it scares the shit out of me.”
That alone should tell you that “Innocent & Vain: an introduction to Nico” is not an album for light listening. Indeed, it is best listened to in a dimly lit room, sitting with your chin in your hands. It is not always easy to endure, yet impossible to tune out. We are of course familiar with the Nico of “The Velvet Underground and Nico,” one of the most influential rock albums ever made. But this is but one face of Nico. This album will introduce you to the full depth of the woman referred to in the liner notes as “the harmonium stabbing harpy of utter despair”.

Listening to this album, I was physically unable to skip past any portion of it, tempted as I was to jump straight to the two Velvet Underground songs. I cannot review “Innocent & Vain” in the traditional way, offering you as I usually do my weekly buy recommendations. Instead, I can only chronicle the experience and let you decide for itself. “Innocent & Vain” opens with Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep it with Mine,” off of “Chelsea Girls”, a song through which the sad innocent that was Nico comes through over violin and a sparse beat, then moves into an alternate version of “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, one of the finest songs ever arranged by human hands. But this is only a brief calm before the storm of melancholy that is to follow.

Beginning with the sound of a ghostly moan through a dark forest, “You Forgot to Answer” made me thoroughly understand Bangs’ comments. “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” was written for Nico by Lou Reed (“writhe and sway to music’s pain”) and fits neatly into the category of “poems on death and despair,” sung to a happy flute line. “Valley of the Kings” is a deeply resonant dirge that made me think of Europe during the plague years, perfectly suited for Nico’s Wagnerian voice. It ends, and – mercifully – we are brought into familiar country again with “Femme Fatale”, the signature Nico / Velvet’s song that speaks to me of every girl I ever had the misfortune to love before I was old enough to know better.

The album moves on through six more tracks of exquisite anguish and sweetness, including “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce” and “Innocent and Vain,” ending with a live and painful version of the Doors' “The End”. And when “The End” ended, I found myself sitting in silence, a long-cold cigarette butt dangling from my lower lip, awed at the sheer intensity of self-inflicted torture and passion that was and always shall be uniquely Nico.

Joshua Samuel Brown, 2002