Album: The Velvet Underground & Nico, The Velvet Underground & Nico: Super Deluxe Edition (UMC/Polydor)

As many a box set proves, it is possible to get too much of a good thing.

Luckily, The Velvet's 1967 debut was, and is, a truly great thing: a boundary-stretching marriage of garage-pop and the avant-garde. Hypnotic, beautiful and harrowing, the album is here presented in a six-disc box set with a live concert of the period, Nico's Chelsea Girl and ample demos that prove it took Lou Reed and co a lot of practice to sound that shambolic.