The Bells is the most experimental album of Lou Reed's Arista era, and perhaps the most underrated of his entire career. Influenced by free jazz and avant-garde music, the record features improvisations by Don Cherry on trumpet and an approach to sound radically different from anything Reed had done before.
The title track that closes the album is a fifteen-minute piece of majestic beauty: Reed describes his own near-death experiences while Cherry improvises over a hypnotic drone. It is one of the strangest and most overwhelming compositions in all his work, and an unexpected bridge between rock and experimental jazz.
The Bells was commercially ignored but artistically valuable: it documented Reed taking risks that few mainstream artists would dare to take. Its reputation has grown over the years among collectors and critics who see it as an essential link in the chain from the Velvet Underground to the contemporary avant-garde.