This 12 months, John Cale will flip 81. Within the many years since he co-founded the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, the adventurous Welsh singer-songwriter, producer, and composer has had a historic, if at occasions deliberately errant, run. Alongside together with his personal albums (which embody excessive factors like 1973’s Paris 1919 and 1974’s Concern), he’s additionally been one in every of music’s most avid collaborators (producing legendary information by Patti Smith, the Stooges, and the Trendy Lovers, and making tremendous duo LPs, just like the Andy Warhol tribute Songs for Drella, with Reed, and his set with Brian Eno, Fallacious Method Up, each from 1990). Cale’s inventory and creative output has waxed and waned through the years (his buddy David Bowie as soon as known as him “probably the most underrated musicians in rock historical past”), however currently his legacy appears at a relative peak, thanks partly to Todd Haynes’ wonderful 2021 VU documentary, which argued that with out Cale’s avant-garde concepts and droning viola, a band of world-changing influential might need simply been one other regular Sixties rock act. Not a foul time to launch a brand new document, and Mercy, Cale’s first in a decade, is one in every of his most compelling.
Filled with swirling sounds, honest crooning, and shimmering rhythms, Mercy can’t assist feeling like a summing up, if not a willful finale: “Lives do matter/Lives don’t matter/Wolves preparing,” he sings on the title monitor. Elsewhere, he asserts that “It’s not the tip of the world,” whilst he makes case that it very effectively could be. However whilst Mercy glares into the void, Cale demonstrates his optimism by hanging out with youthful musicians and infrequently centering the album round modern rhythms, just like the hip-hop he’s lengthy thought of to be a contemporary avant-garde. The British digital producer Actress pitches in on the beeping, melodramatic string drone “Marilyn Monroe’s Legs,” whereas American psychedelic crew Animal Collective put their bizarre stamp on the sweeping, galloping “Eternal Days.”
Destruction is a significant theme on the album, from Cale evoking “the grandeur that was Europe … sinking within the mud” on “Time Stands Nonetheless,” with Sylvan Essso, to photographs of extra private devastation on the hovering, heavy “Noise of You,” and the “Story of Blood,” which opens with a basic Cale piano determine earlier than the beats take over and Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering drifts out and in of the combination like a reminiscence he can’t shake.
He’s additionally haunted by thorny recollections of outdated buddies who’ve left us. Cale’s album collaborations with the Velvet Underground’s German singer Nico have been her profession highlights, however the regal “Moonstruck (Nico’s Music),” with its inflexible strings and harmonium-style keys, pulls no punches: “You’re a moonstruck junkie girl, gazing your ft/Respiratory phrases into an envelope/To be opened in your loss of life.” The jazzy “Night time Crawling,” about hanging out with Bowie once they have been younger gods, is equally trustworthy: “I can’t even inform/Whenever you’re placing me on.”
Like his Welsh brother and hero Dylan Thomas, Cale goes to combat in opposition to the dying of the sunshine till the sunshine is not any extra, however the ghosts of his previous will probably be with him till the tip.
