hushed-chapel intimacy of the third Velvet Underground album and the barbed reportorial vitality of Reed's best songwriting. He offers no great moral revelations and no happy ever after, just big questions and some basic horse sense. "There's a bit of magic in everything," he sings at the very end of the record, "and then some loss to even things out."

Yet the beauty, however dark, of Magic and Loss is in the asking – in the subtle, elegiac lift in Reed's stony sing-speak, the sepulchral resonance of his and Mike Rathke's guitars and the Spartan grace of the storytelling. Reed recounts the victim's harrowing odyssey of radiation treatments, chemotherapy and utter physical erosion with simple detail and then candidly traces his own pain train of confusion, self-recrimination and tentative, hopeful resolution.

Magic and Loss is more formally structured than Reed's last life-cycle operetta, Songs for Drella, written and recorded with his former VU colleague John Cale in memory of Andy Warhol. The album opens with a brief heavy-metal-guitar annunciation, and the fourteen songs all have arty subtitles that read like stage cues ("What's Good: The Thesis," "Power and Glory: The Situation"). Drella, though, was a celebratory requiem for a mentor and pop icon, subtitled with the mock disclaimer "A Fiction." There is no cushion of emotional distance on this album. Magic and Loss was directly inspired by and is dedicated to two close friends of Reed's, "Doc" (the great R&B songwriter Doc Pomus) and "Rita," both of whom recently died of cancer, and it shows in the begrudging but undisguised vulnerability in Reed's singing and writing. "I see you in the hospital, your humor is intact/I'm embarrassed by the strength I seem to lack," he confesses in "No Chance: Regret." On Magic and Loss, Ol' Poker Face looks straight into the face of the Big Inevitable – and flinches.

You can hear it in the very first song, "What's Good: The Thesis." The music is a jaunty reprise of New York's Velvets-redux recipe – Rathke's austere strumming, the glissando slide of Rob Wasserman's stand-up electric bass, Reed's strategic bursts of distorted lead guitar and screeching feedback. But the droll juxtaposition of the banal and the surreal in the lyrics ("What good is seeing eye chocolate/What good's a computerized nose") belies the choke in Reed's delivery