kohl-rimmed eyes glaring from behind a curtain of blond bangs -- her voice was a thing of strange beauty and austerity. On later albums she wrote all her own material, but for Chelsea Girl she unleashed that voice on compositions by Bob Dylan, folk singer Tim Hardin, a sixteen-year-old Jackson Browne and VU's Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison and John Cale. The material ranges from Browne's somber folk songs to Cale and Reed's bleak, art-damaged experiments, yet the mood remains consistently dark, gothic, mysterious, with barely more than flute, guitar, violin, cello and harmonium accompaniment. The eight-minute noise experiment "It Was a Pleasure Then" is virtually a spoken-word piece, with just Cale's electric guitar whining and screeching in the background.

In "Chelsea Girls," she narrates the life of destitute New York scenesters -- "S&M queens," speed freaks, hookers and various other sad sacks whose stories could well be Nico's own: "Her perfect loves don't last," she sings. "Her future died in someone's past."

Even these stark images were less vivid than Browne's poetic visions of loneliness in "The Fairest of the Seasons" and "These Days," where Nico's thick alto bruises the gentle acoustic-guitar picking and ethereal string parts. The latter -- recently used on the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack, as well as in a Kmart ad campaign -- sums up the album's tone of woeful resignation: "If I seem to be afraid to live the life that I have made in song/It's just that I've been losing so long."

JENNY ELISCU
(RS 905 - Sept. 19, 2002)