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JOHN CALE

John Cale

POPtical Illusion

    Despite the album’s playful title, Cale’s second album in just over a year still contains the same feelings of fierce and inquisitive rage that were present in 2023 album MERCY. He remains angry, still incensed by the willful destruction that unchecked capitalists and unrepentant conmen have hoisted upon the wonders of this world and the goodness of its people. But this is not at all MERCY II, or some collection of castoffs, as throughout his career of more than six decades, Cale has never been much for repetition. His vanguard-shaping enthusiasms have shifted among ecstatic classicism and unbound rock, classic songcraft and electronic reimagination with proud restlessness.

    And so, on POPtical Illusion, he foregoes the illustrious cast to burrow mostly alone into mazes of synthesizers and samples, organs and pianos, with words that, as far as Cale goes, constitute a sort of swirling hope, a sage insistence that change is yet possible. Produced by Cale and longtime artistic partner Nita Scott, POPtical Illusion is the work of someone trying to turn toward the future – exactly as Cale always has.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. God Made Me Do It (don’t Ask Me Again)
    2. Davies And Wales
    3. Calling You Out
    4. Edge Of Reason
    5. I’m Angry
    6. How We See The Light
    7. Company Commander
    8. Setting Fires
    9. Shark-Shark
    10. Funkball The Brewster
    11. All To The Good
    12. Laughing In My Sleep
    13. There Will Be No River

    John Cale

    Word For The Dying - 2023 Repress

      First time vinyl repress of this John Cale album, originally released on the Opal label in 1989, produced by Brian Eno.

      “‘Words For The Dying’ has at its heart The Falklands Suite, Cale’s baroque if heartfelt response to the Anglo-Argentinian War, which finds him setting the poems of his beloved Dylan Thomas to music. When building songs around another’s words, the results often sound forced, but Cale does a magnificent job of compressing Thomas’s lyricism into neat melodic phrases, themselves just components of a vast harmonic mega-structure scored for the USSR’s Orchestra of Symphonic & Popular Music of Gostelradio. A project that could easily have collapsed under the weight of its own ambition is instead a late masterpiece, thanks to Cale’s deep-seated compositional genius, and unobtrusive but resonant production from Brian Eno.” - Kiran Sande

      TRACK LISTING

      The Falkland Suite
      Introduction
      There Was A Saviour
      Interlude I
      On A Wedding
      Anniversary
      Interlude II
      Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed
      Do Not Go Gentle Into That
      Good Night

       
      Songs Without Words
      Songs Without Words. I
      Songs Without Words. II
      The Soul Of Carmen
      Miranda

      John Cale

      Mercy

        For nearly 60 years, or at least since he was a young Welshman who moved to New York and formed The Velvet Underground, Cale has been reinventing his music with dazzling and inspiring regularity. There was the bewitching chamber folk of Paris 1919 followed instantly by the gnarled rock of Fear, the provocative and spare song cycle Music for a New Society followed more than 30 years later by mighty and unabashed electronic updates. Once again, here is Cale, reimagining how his music is made, sounds, and even works. His engrossing 12-track MERCY moves through true dark-night-of-the-soul electronics toward vulnerable love songs and hopeful considerations for the future.

        On MERCY, Cale enlists some of music’s most curious young minds: Animal Collective, Sylvan Esso, Laurel Halo, Tei Shi, Actress. They’re only some of the astounding cast here, brilliant musicians who climb inside Cale’s consummate vision of the world and help him redecorate there. Cale turned 80 in March, and he’s watched as many peers have passed away, particularly during the last decade. MERCY is the continuation of a long career’s work with wonder. Cale has always searched for new ways to explore old ideas of alienation, hurt, and joy; MERCY is the latest transfixing find of this unsatisfied mind.

        The writings and recordings that shaped MERCY piled up for years, as Cale watched society totter at the brink of dystopia. Trump and Brexit, Covid and climate change, civil rights and right-wing extremism—Cale let the bad news of the day filter into his lines, whether that meant contemplating the sovereignty and legal status of sea ice melting near the poles or the unhinged arming of Americans. Lessons from a life (still being) richly lived floated to the fore, too, nodded to on the previously released “NIGHT CRAWLING.” If we’re always regretting our past, aren’t we conscripting ourselves to permanent disappointment?

        During “STORY OF BLOOD,” after the piano prelude gives way to a frame-rattling beat and synthesizers that feel like sunshine splashed across a snowfield, the voices of Cale and Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering slide past one another, two phantoms trying to find a partner amid the modern din. “Swing your soul,” they both sing in aspiration. In the final verse, Cale remembers this existence is not just about himself. “I’m going back to get them, my friends in the morning. Bring them with me into the light.” The accompanying video by Emmy-winning director Jethro Waters is a mix of disturbing and serene featuring both Cale and Weyes Blood. Its deep tones and religious images emphasize the track’s dark, spiritual mood.

        Cale elaborates: “I’d been listening to Weyes Blood’s latest record and remembered Natalie’s puritanical vocals. I thought if I could get her to come and sing with me on the ‘Swing your soul’ section, and a few other harmonies, it would be beautiful. What I got from her was something else! Once I understood the versatility in her voice, it was as if I’d written the song with her in mind all along. Her range and fearless approach to tonality was an unexpected surprise. There’s even a little passage in there where she’s a dead-ringer for Nico.”

        TRACK LISTING

        1. Mercy Feat. Laurel Halo
        2. Marilyn Monroe’s Leg (Beauty Elsewhere) Feat. Actress
        3. Noise Of You
        4. Story Of Blood Feat. Weyes Blood
        5. Time Stands Still Feat. Sylvan Esso
        6. Moonstruck (Nico’s Song)
        7. Everlasting Days Feat. Animal Collective
        8. Night Crawling
        9. Not The End Of The World
        10. The Legal Status Of Ice Feat. Fat White Family
        11. I Know You’re Happy Feat. Tei Shi
        12. Out Your Window

        Domino Records reissue John Cale’s classic live album ‘Fragments Of A Rainy Season’, featuring his revered interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ amongst many solo versions from his enduring catalogue and previously unreleased outtakes.

        ‘Fragments Of A Rainy Season’ was the first live John Cale album to feature him performing solo and ‘unplugged’ - before that term became a mid 1990s buzzword.

        In contrast to the jaundiced punk truculence of ‘Sabotage/Live’ (1979) or ‘Even Cowgirls Get The Blues’ (1986), ‘Fragments Of A Rainy Season’ gives us Cale at his most melodic and moving, a mellowed and certainly a soberer man in a Yamamoto jacket and a lopsided haircut running through a selection of his prettiest songs. It’s a Cale many love deeply, a man alone at a concert-hall Steinway revisiting the pop-rock of ‘Paris 1919’ and ‘A Child’s Christmas In Wales’, as wistful and whimsical as any 70s singer songwriter holding court at LA’s Troubadour club. It’s the Cale who disavowed the spiky nihilism and decadence of the Velvets, inspired instead by melodicism of Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson (to whom he’d paid haunting homage on ‘Slow Dazzle’s brilliant Beach Boys pastiche ‘Mr. Wilson’). It’s the Cale who improbably took a staff job at Warner-Reprise in LA and - for an all-too-brief moment - became part of the Burbank producers’ mafia alongside Lenny Waronker and his laidback chums. (Lest we forget, 1973’s ‘Paris 1919’ featured members of Little Feat and The Crusaders among the backing musicians.)

        Cale being Cale, ‘Fragments Of A Rainy Season’ isn’t all rueful tenderness. The deceptively jaunty ‘Darling I Need You’ is flippantly introduced as a song about “religious awakening in the southern part of the United States,” while Elvis’ ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is no less gothic in the solo version here than it is in the Grand Guignol horror show of the original on ‘Slow Dazzle’. ‘Guts’ is as close as Cale ever came to Lou Reed at his most withering.

        It’s easy to forget that - years before Jeff Buckley and The X-Factor - he was the first artist to recognize the hymnal majesty of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, or that it was his original 1991 reading of the song that popped up on the soundtrack of ‘Shrek’.

        TRACK LISTING

        On A Wedding Anniversary
        Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed
        Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
        Cordoba
        Buffalo Ballet
        A Child’s Christmas In Wales
        Darling I Need You
        Guts
        Ship Of Fools
        Leaving It Up To You
        The Ballad Of Cable Hogue
        Chinese Envoy
        Dying On The Vine
        Fear (Is A Man’s Best Friend)
        Heartbreak Hotel
        Style It Takes
        Paris 1919
        (I Keep A) Close Watch
        Thoughtless Kind
        Hallelujah
        Fear (Is A Man’s Best Friend) (Outtake)*
        Amsterdam (Outtake) *
        Broken Hearts (Outtake) *
        I’m Waiting For The Man (Outtake) *
        Heartbreak Hotel (Outtake - Strings) *
        Fear (Is A Man’s Best Friend) (Outtake - Strings) *
        Paris 1919 (Outtake - Strings) *
        Antarctica Starts Here (Outtake - Strings) *

        * = Bonus Track (REWIGCD107X & REWIGLP107X [& REWIGLP107 As
        Digital Download] Only)

        This unique collaboration was originally released in 1971 and saw Cale (fresh from his ground-breaking work as a member of the Velvet Underground and now finding his feet as a solo artist) and Riley (noted for his highly influential works “In C” and “A Rainbow in Curved Air”) create a work of atmosphere and uniqueness. All instrumental, with the exception of the song “The Soul of Patrick Lee”, “Church of Anthrax” was the perfect melding of the experimental genius of two unique musicians. Hard to catagorise, the album was recorded a year prior to its release by Columbia in February 1971 and actually preceded Cale’s first solo album.

        TRACK LISTING

        1: Church Of Anthrax
        2: The Hall Of Mirrors In The Palace Of Versailles
        3: The Soul Of Patrick Lee
        4: Ides Of March
        5: The Protege


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