Nico - Desertshore

Desertshore is Nico at her most starkly beautiful, harmonium drones and a voice that sounds like it's arriving from somewhere very far away, remastered here from the original tapes.

By 1970 Nico had moved well past Chelsea Girl's relative accessibility, and this record, co-produced by John Cale, finds her working almost entirely in a self-invented language, songs built from harmonium, minimal arrangement, and a deadpan Germanic delivery that turned genuine bleakness into something oddly hypnotic. Several tracks originated in Philippe Garrel's film La Cicatrice Intérieure, and that cinematic, dreamlike quality carries through the whole record even outside the film's context. It never charted, never tried to, and has spent the decades since quietly earning devotion from artists as varied as Throbbing Gristle, Morrissey, and Björk.

Janitor of Lunacy opens the album at its most unsettling, harmonium drone and Nico's voice creating something closer to incantation than song. Afraid carries genuine vulnerability beneath its stark arrangement, one of the record's more emotionally direct moments. All That Is My Own closes the album on something resigned and hauntingly beautiful, Cale's arrangement giving the harmonium real weight.

Barely accessible by any commercial measure and hugely influential anyway. Desertshore rewards exactly the patience it demands.