Last year, a remarkable rock’n’roll time capsule came to light. Unheard for more than 50 years, Lou Reed’s acoustic demos for his soon-to-be band – the Velvet Underground – were released, revealing one of the most important cultural partnerships of the 20th century in its infancy. If that claim sounds inflated, as well as motivating a great many taboo-busting creatives prone to wearing shades, the Velvet Underground also inspired superfan Václav Havel and Czechoslovakia’s resistance to Soviet totalitarianism.
The other person in the room with Reed was Welshman John Cale, whose mastery of repetition and drone – one gleaned from his studies in the New York noise avant garde – made the Velvet Underground just as groundbreaking as Reed’s chemically frank lyrics. Cale’s body of work since has covered an extraordinary amount of territory, encompassing experimental offerings, notable collaboration, soundtrack and production work – Patti Smith, the list goes on – as well as albums of his own songcraft.
Throughout, Cale’s sonorous voice has been as frequent a presence as his bass or viola work, his intonations often recalling late-life David Bowie – a close friend whose youthful high jinks with Cale are celebrated in the video for Night Crawling, a track from Mercy, Cale’s latest album. Cale will be 81 in March; he will soon resume a UK tour derailed by Covid a few months ago. Mercy is his first album of new songs since Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood (2012), an unfortunately titled outing that featured icy electronic beats and some curiously flat collaborations with the producer Danger Mouse.
Nookie Wood was a portrait of an artist looking to move forwards but perhaps not finding the right inputs, or co-conspirators to share the room with. Mercy offers up songs in which Cale croons either cavernously or numinously, his long-fingered work on piano and strings rubbing up against electronics, as they did on Nookie Wood.
A cadre of much younger, often leftfield collaborators line up to exchange ideas with a titan of cool. They can bring much to the table. Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood has one of the loveliest voices in contemporary American song, but she also spent years in noise bands. Her languorous presence on the lush and glitching Story of Blood amounts to far more than that of a token female foil, a meeting of minds comparable in spirit, if not in sound, to David Byrne’s team-up with St Vincent in 2012.
Psychedelic heroes of the 00s Animal Collective are on hand to lend gauzy mischief to Everlasting Days. Doppler effects dapple, backing vocals hiccup, and Animal Collective speed up and slow down the song’s tempo to emphasise the slipperiness of time; a good fit. Although Marilyn Monroe’s Legs is another title you wish someone had run past any person living in the 21st century, the semi-improvised track allows British producer Actress to get stuck in, with an undertow of twitchy dread.
Cale’s lifelong devotion to uncommon sounds remains very much in evidence; virtually every track here finds some way to be intriguingly unsettling as he ponders “lives mattering”, or the retreat of the polar ice sheets – or Nico. Foisted on the Velvet Underground by Andy Warhol, the German vocalist had her subsequent solo albums produced by Cale. On Moonstruck (Nico’s Song), he tenderly considers the “moonstruck junkie lady” (again, technically accurate, but…) and comes “to make my peace” with her.
One of the best things about Moonstruck, however, is its lack of beats. Perhaps the most baffling aspect of Cale’s latterday work is his penchant for dated rhythms. As someone whose career coincided with the machine-music age, whose collaborators have included the father of ambient, Brian Eno, Cale seems to have a vast blind spot here. Mid-paced and desultory, his beats mostly limp along in the style of 1990s DJ bar aural wallpaper. They reimagine trip-hop badly, or echo 00s chillout playlists. Perhaps no one has the courage to inform this pillar of the avant garde how anachronistic his approach is. Perhaps the years Cale spent working with Nick Franglen of Lemon Jelly have had a very long tail.
While the title track has its gooseflesh moments – Cale singing “I’m looking for mercy more and more” – there is a politeness to all the percolations beneath, cooked up in association with electronic producer Laurel Halo, who once put out challenging work on the Hyperdub label.
This record is crying out for the calibre of musicians that helped Bowie make Blackstar, or Bill Callahan’s painterly band, or a truly dial-moving producer – or perhaps some intellectual assaults on the very notion of music itself to pin the listener down and inform them that John Cale – John Cale! – is in the building. As it is, “rivers rush by” on potentially wonderful tracks such as Not the End of the World, where Cale really leans into his Bowie-esque delivery. Below, the beats check their phones.
