from the LP The Marble Index, Elektra Records, 1969Disembodied & incorporeal, Nico’s voice always threatened to break at any moment, and yet, her harrowing delivery (particularly here, paired with John Cale’s atonal, perpetually crying viola and a backwards tracked harmonium) sears right through the listener’s retinas and eardrums, charging into the brain and manually unplugging the emotions that might get in the way of this dissociating dirge, “…friar hermit stumbles over, the cloudy borderline…a thousand cycles to come, a thousand times to win, a thousand ways to run the world…frozen warnings close to mine, close to the frozen borderline; frozen warnings close to mine, close to the frozen borderline…” Where her first album was composed entirely of other people’s songs and pushed a pop-folk feel, Nico wrote all the offerings here herself and it’s a decidedly less pop-related affair---in fact, there’s nothing even resembling “pop” music here, which is what makes these haunting landscapes so compelling. This song feels like the soundtrack to those moments in life when you realize things have become so much stranger than fiction you could never even come up with such a journey in your wildest daydreams, the strangest life we’ve ever lived.
