u/mellotronworker

For all that the first album is their most famous, the purest sound of the band as it was intended is probably WL/WH with its emphasis on noise and monotony and little care about whether or not the needles were hitting the red or not.

I've loved this band for the last 40+ years, and find it's one of the only two or three bands that I keep coming back to regularly. WL/WH was probably the last of their albums that I really got into, because a lot of it pretty daunting. You don't just sit down for a quiet listen and put on Sister Ray. Or at least I never used to.

Listening to it now got me thinking: where would they have ended up if that lineup had persisted? I know it's asking a lot because of all the personal issues in the band, but putting them to one side where would they have gone musically? With Cale on board, I cannot see them turning out anything like the third album, but I also find myself trying to imagine what they could have produced that moved on from the second.

So assuming that the bands didn't fall the completely, where would they progress to musically?

For me it's Black Star by Bowie. It just sounds like utter mediocrity to me, like everything else he did since Scary Monsters.