Lou Reed and Edgar Allan Poe appear to make a perfect match -- going all the way back to "The Gift," a macabre story song from the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat album. "The Gift" finds a man named Waldo mailing himself to his blasé girlfriend in a giant gift box, only to be killed when the box is opened with a pair of sheet-metal cutters. But even in his grim death, there's beauty, as Waldo's spurting blood makes "rhythmic arcs of red [that] pulsate gently in the morning sun." In fact, both Poe and Reed are exquisitely self-conscious artists who flirted with hackdom, Poe as a pulp journalist and Reed as a staff songwriter at Pickwick Records in the early '60s. Both can walk the thin line between brilliance and horseshit. And their obsessions often overlap. The places where Eros bleeds into Thanatos. Claustrophobia. Revenge. Guilt. The fragility of identity. The desire for -- and fear of -- transformation or self-destruction. "Let us do what you fear most," Reed sings on "Some Kind of Love," from the Velvets' third album.

Still, he seems to have pulled back from the edge decades ago. And there's always been a self-protective detachment about Lou that's at odds with the more hysterical characters in Poe (except, perhaps, for the singer of "Heroin," who's lost in the tell-tale beating of his own pulse). That coolness serves Reed well on his new two-CD set, The Raven (Reprise; in stores this Tuesday, January 28), where he rewrites, reinterprets, and riffs over Poe's works without being overwhelmed by a more powerful progenitor. Okay, that makes it a concept album, but don't hold your ears and run: The Raven has more in common with Tom Waits's recent theatrical work than with, say, Emerson Lake & Palmer's abominable Tarkus. Give a large share of the credit to the tasteful cast Reed has assembled, which includes Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, and the McGarrigle Sisters. The result is a glorious mess that runs from radio dramas with beatnik musical grooves ("The Cask," a hilarious retelling of "The Cask of Amontillado" with Buscemi and Dafoe) to brand new Reed songs ("Edgar Allan Poe," a full-tilt rocker that leaves Reed gasping to keep up with its pace). For all its pleasures, The Raven will wear down even the most patient Reed fan, but it's a good disc for dipping. It's not an album that's going to lure many new fans to his oeuvre except maybe some Poe aficionados who aren't offended by the liberties taken here.

Indeed, one listen to "Edgar Allan Poe" (with its half-assed Reedian couplet "These are the stories of Edgar Allan Poe/Not exactly the boy next door") and you know you're getting a stylized version of the poet -- a homage alternately reverent and flippant. His coke-fixated rewrite of "The Raven" (recited here by Dafoe) spins between defacement and beauty, ratcheting up the poem's abject self-loathing to the boiling point when the speaker indicts himself: "Sweaty, arrogant, dickless, liar." But Reed never strays too far from Poe's deliberate verse rhythms: he colors within the lines.

There are familiar musical gems here too. A sensitive re-reading of "The Bed," from Reed's 1973 opus Berlin, shimmers over a gentle, pulsing cello; it deftly follows a version of "The Fall of the House of Usher" that underscores one of the twin themes of both works: the death of beauty, the beauty of death. "Call on Me" conjures echoes from the irresistibly lush, folky side of the Velvets, with Laurie Anderson taking a brief turn as chanteuse. Avant cabaret singer Antony does an æthereal, uncanny rendition of "Perfect Day," from Reed's 1972 album Transformer. It's one of the very high points of a release haunted by memory: Antony's quivery delivery not only recalls Bryan Ferry, Roy Orbison, and Rufus Wainwright, it also evokes the lost androgyne that Lou Reed could never quite become.

What Reed did become remains an open question, as he asks on one of the new songs, "Who Am I?", a deliciously slick, overproduced pop hymn to transcendence that dips and soars over strings and lyrics about aging, sex, death. Reed's pipes were shot 25 years ago: as he strains to sing the words, his voice seems a gnarled, ugly thing that haunts the basement. The song never answers its questions, and that's not surprising at this point: Reed has become the single most useless explicator of his own work, often far more eager, in interviews, to discuss the specifications of some new compressor in his home studio. But The Raven -- so strange and vexed by his past -- is like a voice from that basement. And it assures us that Lou Reed is just as haunted by his own past as we are.

Issue Date: January 24 - 30, 2003