On certain records, time stands so still you can hear a needle drop. It's permanently 1 a.m., the night is made of burnt-out dreams, and amnesia is just a sigh away. "Candy Says" fixes the slo-emo oblivion of the Velvet Underground with the halting grace of a sleepwalker doing a naked pirouette: " . . . I've come to hate my body/And all that it requires in this life." Big Star's "Big Black Car" might just give the purest expression to this mood (and mood is everything here, because the outside world has been banished from view) of numbness and rapture so entwined you can't or don't want to tell them apart. Syllables, instruments, flesh, and memory are slurred together to form a petrified cloud of longing: "Why should I care/Drivin's a gas/It ain't gonna lassszzt." The singer makes like a tree falling in an empty forest, gratefully surrendering to decay and disintegration,... More >>>