John Cale is on a formidable scorching streak in his 80s. When the Welsh avant-garde legend launched Mercy final yr, it was his first album in a decade. However he’s already produced one other gem with POPtical Phantasm, a masterful tribute to his bleak creativeness. Six many years into his profession, Cale is making music with a renewed sense of urgency—he hit a inventive turning level within the pandemic, in a frenzy the place he wrote 80 songs in a yr. But he’s reached probably the most adventurous phases in his ever-eccentric profession.
A part of Cale’s prolific increase comes from his realization that he’s misplaced so lots of his mates, friends, and collaborators in recent times. There’s clearly his outdated Velvet Underground comrade Lou Reed, whereas Mercy additionally had elegies mourning David Bowie and Nico. Nevertheless it additionally comes from trying on the world collapse throughout him. Nothing like an apocalypse to provide an artist like Cale a blast of late-game inspiration.
POPtical Phantasm is stuffed with grim songs a couple of planet in flames, but it’s stuffed with playful power, mixing synths and guitars with digital beats from an elder hip-hop fiend. Nevertheless it rests on his distinctive vocal presence, as Cale particulars his nightmares in his deep, grave, deadpan Welsh brogue. As a man who’s all the time thrived on his unfavorable mojo, these songs convey out all his mordant humor. “When you’ve achieved belongings you’d wished you’ve by no means achieved,” he sings in “Davies and Wales,” “consider the belongings you’re going to do tonight.”
At 82, Cale has constructed his entire legend on left-field surprises like this, going again to his earliest days within the NYC classical avant-garde scene, as an apprentice to John Cage. He based the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, remodeling rock historical past together with his experimental sensibility, to not point out his jittery walk-it-home piano blast in “I’m Ready for the Man.” He’s blazed his personal path as a singer-songwriter, particularly his Nineteen Seventies “Island trilogy” of Worry, Sluggish Dazzle, and Helen of Troy. As a producer, he bought basic debut albums out of Patti Smith, The Stooges, and the Trendy Lovers; he and Reed teamed up for the 1990 Andy Warhol envoi Songs for Drella. In his spare time, Cale took a mega-obscure Leonard Cohen deep reduce referred to as “Hallelujah,” revived it together with his personal 1993 model, then handed it on to Jeff Buckley and watched the track turn out to be a regular.
Mercy went heavy on the particular visitors, as Cale collaborated with youthful artists like Lauren Halo, Animal Collective, Sylvan Esso, and Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering. However POPtical Phantasm skips that method. It’s extra centered, with Cale and his longtime collaborator Nita Scott holed up in his on LA studio. These songs vent much more political fury than Mercy. He rages about capitalism, the collapse of democracy, environmental disasters—he even calls one spotlight “I’m Indignant.” Within the seething “Fringe of Motive,” he broods concerning the future, singing, “Appears we’ve gone too far to repair it,” at the same time as he asks, “Are you able to see the lights by means of the rain?”
No person since Leonard Cohen has had such a inventive increase within the eighty-something years, which is smart since neither of them was ever exacly the starry-eyed idealistic kind, even of their youthful days. Like Cohen, Cale all the time liked taking part in the position of the outdated man. As all the time, he’s fixated on corruption, paranoia, and the darkish facet of human nature. He responded to the unfavorable power of the Seventies with the well-known proverb in his track “Worry,” the place he growled, “Worry is a person’s finest buddy.” However he sings that very same line on this album—in some way, in 2024, that sentiment doesn’t sound outdated.
POPtical Phantasm is looser than Mercy, extra open-ended, as within the intelligent synth-pop of “Laughing in My Sleep,” which evokes his basic Brian Eno collaboration Flawed Method Up, or the distorted electro-murk of’”Funkball the Brewster.” Cale closes the album with a superbly doomy piano ballad “There Will Be No River.” From one other artist, it might need felt like a closing phrase. However throughout POPtical Phantasm, Cale sounds fascinated on taking advantage of the longer term.
