["Transformer"] is a major disappointment after [Reed's] brilliant first effort. Who would have thought that the man who wrote Sister Ray could turn out—and so soon—to be just another pretty face?

Well, of course, that's not really fair. Reed, you'll recall, was the creative force behind the Velvet Underground, that strange and still misunderstood aggregation that sang about heroin and Jesus before either was pop-fashionable. In 1966, in fact, Lou and the Velvets were about as avant-garde as could be—which consequently obscured the fact that they were a classic hardrock band cut from the same cloth as the original Byrds or the early Rolling Stones … and that Lou was an exquisitely acute songwriter….

That's all still true, but you'd be hard put to prove it with anything from Reed's new "Transformer." There are a few cuts that suggest the Reed of old, and predictably they're the...