LAST NEW YEAR'S EVE, the sagging economy claimed another victim. Max's Kansas City, one of Manhattan's best known and most innovative rock clubs closed its doors for good, symbolically ending an era of popular music. At Max's, Bruce Springsteen once opened for Bob Marley, the New York Dolls got their start, and a plethora of unknowns enjoyed brief moments of fame, But above all, the Village hangout will be remembered by veterans of the 60s as the birthplace of Lou Reed's Velvet Underground, perhaps the most influential group to ever emerge form New York City.

The Velvet Underground never garnered a large popular following. Its music was too intense, too frightening, too different. In 1967, while the Beatles were singing that "all you need is love" and making veiled metaphorical references to be burgeoning drug culture, Reed, the Underground's songwriter, graphically described the joys and horrors of narcotics, life on the streets, and, ten years before the punks, the general decay of society. The music was fresh--an amalgam of raw, sometimes un-melodic guitar solos and John Cale's imaginative violin in tunes so unorthodox they assaulted listeners. Countless punk and new wave bands of the 70s drew inspiration from the Velvet Underground which--after a four-year existence and a few classic tracks like "Sweet Jane" and "Waiting for the Man"--called it quits in 1971.

Today, Reed is 40 years old and--in the wake of a brilliant but erratic solo career--has just released what may be his most powerful musical statement. The Blue Mask is the work of a mature artist; the hostility and bitterness of the past that came to the fore on the successful Sally Can't Dance have given way to passion and love with an every-present undercurrent of anger. Max's may be dead and the Underground buried, but with The Blue Mask, Reed displays at 40 the vigor of a forever-young rocker.

Thematically, The Blue Mask is a study in contrasts. The album opens with the "My House," an uncharacteristic yet moving look at marital bliss featuring Reed and his wife Sylvia at home. Love and contentment run thickly through this track, as they do through rocker that espouses heterosexual love as they ultimate salvation in a mad world.

But then Reed lets loose his anger with songs about a rapist, a masochist, a drunkard and a man going insane. Reed paints the latter two characters as victims of society. His wrath for the rapist, though, knows no end The subject of "The Gun" is a "dirty animal" who won't hesitate to "blow your brains out" to satisfy his urges. Even more frightening and intense are the almost unbearable lyrics of the album's title cut:

Wash the razor in the rain

Let me luxuriate in pain

Please don't set me free

Death means a lot to me

...He put a pin through the nipples on his chest

He thought he was a saint

Contrats also pervade the music, Calm, harmonious tunes are followed by screaming, distorted ones. Melodic, lush guitar textures give way to feedback and a multitude of strange noises. The title track, for example, begins with a chaotic intro of power chords and drum rolls; then feed-backing guitars enter producing a sound akin to the horn of a steamship.

While every track is vintage Reed, two in particular stand out. One could spend hours trying to figure out "The Heroine," a bare, haunting song that features only a guitar and Reed's voice. At first, it seems a tale of adventure on the high seas that sports one hitch: the hero is a woman. But the cut takes on added significance when one remembers the Velvet Underground sang "Heroin," a violently direct song about drugs. All at once, the drug imagery emerges.

While the Heroine dressed

In a virgin white dress