Some Kinda Love: Performing The Music Of The Velvet Underground

Album review

With a few lineup changes at the start, and a couple hiatuses since, the Feelies have been together for over 45 years now. The band upended traditional rock 'n' roll cliches and structure to arrive at their own beautiful jingle-jangle mourning, propelled by a submerged and insistent force—oh, let's just call it Jersey motorik. Their music is characterized by strict attention to volume, repetition, and the implementation of subtle changes in tempo and dynamics. Fans of the band have longed for a full-length live album for years; with their Springsteen-length sets and seemingly endless bursts of energy, the Feelies are among the greatest live bands in the world, after all. But the group was too perfectionist to ever allow such a thing to happen with their own songs. Here's a great solution, then: Some Kinda Love, a sprawling set of 18 Velvet Underground songs, recorded at Jersey City's White Eagle Hall in 2018.

We all know the adage that, while it didn't sell too well upon release, every kid who bought the Velvet Underground's first album later went and started a band. And from their start in the late 1970s in a Haledon, New Jersey garage, the Feelies showed themselves to be a particularly smart, suburban variant of the Reedophile. They were of the punk era, and absolutely informed by it, especially in their first recordings. But they did so without making too much of a fuss at the hairdresser. With their buttoned-up intensity, emphasis on those quiet-loud shifts, ironic lyrics, and the sort of harmonic guitar solos one could sing along to note-for-note, the Feelies were a clear template for what became known in the 1980s as indie-rock, and were a huge influence on a swath of acts who came later, from REM to Sonic Youth, and Yo La Tengo to Galaxie 500.

This recording is such a treat. The album starts with "Sunday Morning," the first song on VU's first album, then closes out with "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'," the last song on their final studio album, Loaded. Such attention to detail shows you that you are about to get taken to school, so sit down, shut up, and listen loud. Different band members take charge on lead vocals depending on the song, which is swell and is a nod to their extended family of bands the Trypes, Yung Wu, and Speed the Plough. Glenn Mercer's vocals at times channel the exact timbre of mid-to-late period Reed (especially on "New Age") that it feels like a seance. The Feelies know these songs so well, and they simply appropriate the structures and chord changes with love enough to perform them straight ahead here ("Sweet Jane," "What Goes On"), and stretched-into-just-shy-of-oblivion there ("All Tomorrow's Parties," "Oh Sweet Nuthin'"). They absolutely steamroll through and inject new life into songs you've heard a million times, like "I'm Waiting For My Man," "Run Run Run," and especially an amped-up "White Light/White Heat."

Some Kinda Love might prove to be the best tribute record of the 2020s. The only thing missing from it is a half hour version of "Sister Ray." © Mike McGonigal/Qobuz