Reed set up this self-promotion with three well-received, manifestly artistic albums - 1989's political New York; 1990's John Cale-co-written Andy Warhol cycle, Songs for Drella; and 1992's serious-as-death-and-the-Grammys Magic and Loss. Yet his subsequent output - 1996's Set the Twilight Reeling and 1998's live Perfect Night - generated little rock & roll credibility. Always annoying when he dished out random insults, he wasn't any more likable when he pontificated. So who inside the rock world was gonna argue that he was still on the edge of something? Basically, he wasn't.

But as Reed gets what he wanted and loses what he had, fans are missing some of his strongest music ever. The live album was his best (of many) since 1974's Rock & Roll Animal, and Twilight, pigeonholed as his love offering to Laurie, was beyond that a daring guitarorama and a full-bodied, uniquely consistent excursion into the throwaway hodgepodge mode that yielded so many keepers in his neglected Seventies work. Ecstasy is even more impressive. Dominated emotionally by dark songs about extreme sex and relationships gone sour, it will once again be linked to Anderson, even though many of its details diverge radically from what everyone knows about the couple's life together - that they have no children, for instance. Resist the impulse to turn music into gossip and hear Ecstasy for what it is - a complex, musically gorgeous synthesis of the obsessions that powered Reed's failed 1973 Berlin and his great marriage albums of the early Eighties, especially The Blue Mask.

Since happy love is much rarer in good art than it is in good lives, Twilight remains moderately miraculous - far from innocent of struggle and doubt, it's nevertheless the most openhearted, sweet-tempered record Reed has ever put out there. It was only a moment, though, and on Ecstasy he says hello to his old demons. Masking profound rage with bitchy back talk, Reed's romantic egotism has always doomed his personal and artistic commitments - he needs new sensations. But perhaps because he's put in two decades as an attempted mensch, first with ex-wife Sylvia Morales and then with Anderson, his demons now sometimes seem more like daemons, geniuses, as on the passionately impenetrable title song, which is about a soul-shaking sexual adventure by or with a mythifie