Nico – The Marble Index

Domino

Nico is magic. In the sense that she somehow took inspiration from Jim Morrison yet wrote non-execrable lyrics like alchemic faecomancy. In the sense that she’s the weiße hexe who was later emulated by goths, in drugs perhaps more than in music.

She’s not a great singer but she is a fucking brilliant one. The kind of international human who’s at home in New York, but also Manchester, but also Ibiza. And not to brush over in valorisation — we should describe her as a racist prick on account of her being, unequivocally, a racist prick.

I spent a bunch of time listening to her complete works a few years ago and it’s solidly excellent. I’m going to take this album as my cue to get more of the Faction stuff, which is icily haunting at a time when goth proper was choosing theatricality and predictable tropes over unnerving dub hinterlands.

But we’re here for The Marble Index. I think of all the Velvet Underground effluvia this is the record I come back to most. I still massively rate Lou Reed as a songwriter but Nico is sheer vibes, like a cliff-face. From one angle she’s massively unaffected — the thin voice, that querulous vibrato. The proper folk singer approach of singing the notes largely undecorated. Nothing clever in her singing.

From another angle, of course, John Cale is a well-heeled avant-garde player and his influence is opulently palpable. So where later Nico oscillates over simple chords and rhythms, The Marble Index is somewhat more plush. Nico’s hand organ is something of a backbone that gets pocked by the boiling oil of Cale at full throttle.

Plenty here is a good study in colour and arrangement — not so much because Cale extends chords into new harmonic territory, so much as he uses beating near-octave oscillations to constantly intimate collapse. “Julius Caesar” is something like chords with birds on chains, pulling away from the root but being yanked back to the droning core. “Frozen Warnings” somehow sounds like short-wave radio interference over an a capella funerary piece. Possibly the highlight, “Evening Of Light”, does a stand-up job of a ghost’s caricature of bedsit-induced paranoia. A constant tussle that cedes to a voluptuous racket or black hole that may well be the aching void of the album’s centre.

I don’t imagine anyone reading hasn’t heard The Marble Index. It’s kind of core listening for a certain kind of music fan and I’d imagine bang in the middle of whatever Freq‘s demographics are. For what it’s worth, it’s a decent edition — it sounds better than my ’90s CD reissue, there’s a lot more depth and clarity. Because there usually is, you know how modern reissues are.

If you’re not on board with Nico, it’ll pass you by. If you’re somehow a bit into ice-leaden gothy horror and imperious yet flatly Germanic singing BUT haven’t heard The Marble Index then, well, I don’t know where you should start blaming but maybe go for your parents and work outwards.

It’s a belter. She’s a racist prick but this is a belter.

-Kev Nickells-