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Reviews Amazon.co.uk Review The former Velvet Underground chanteuse's second solo album, The Marble Index, remains capable, decades after its gestation, of reducing the most vibrant of social gatherings to a morbid silence within three tracks. The Marble Index never got played on the radio, except by disc jockeys who were tired of their work and couldn't be bothered writing the letter of resignation. Which is to say that it's hard work. Her debut solo effort, Chelsea Girl, released a couple of years earlier, had contained songs written by Jackson Browne and Lou Reed, and some occasional semblance of a tune had therefore occasionally infested Nico's trademark stentorian drone. She wrote The Marble Index herself, and while her disdain for melody and John Cale's discordant but sympathetic arrangements occasionally achieve a certain fluency, getting from one end of The Marble Index to the other remains a challenge that deters all but the boldest: the Paris-Dakar rally of pop albums. --Andrew Mueller What the Critics Say... Wire (6/00, pp.35-6) - "...[A] glacial classic....shimmering song-mirages which disappear with the harmonium's dying notes..."