Patti Smith’s Horses; Jonathan Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’; and, of course, the shrieking, scraping maelstroms of electric viola which helped put the art in the Velvet Underground’s pop.
If these are a few of your favourite things, you’ll likely have guessed their common denominator – the legendary musician and producer John Cale, injecting his avant-garde approach into the rock world for a good 60 years. Now aged 82, the man who did for Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ what Hendrix did for ‘All Along the Watchtower’ shows no sign of letting up.
Which Cale are we getting on Poptical Illusion, his eighteenth solo studio album? The balladeer-craftsman of 1973’s ‘Paris 1919’, an indelible baroque-pop earworm as taut with atmosphere as a great modernist short story? The grizzled avant-garde past master delivering Anglo-Welsh lyrics on Kelly Lee Owens’ ‘Corner of My Sky’ in 2020? Someone else entirely?
Well, opener ‘God Made Me Do It (Don’t Ask Me Again)’ finds its footing in the sort of outsized beat that Owens perfected, bounding along with the surging leaps and falls of a moonwalking astronaut. But its repeating hook is a radiant cloud of weightless, wizardly woodwinds, each instrument blending together like Steve Reich’s mesmeric Music for 18 Musicians.
Remember the heart-bisecting jazz piano Cale improvised on Nick Drake’s ‘Northern Sky’? ‘God Made Me Do It’ seems to come from a similar place of hope, those woodwinds glowing out with beacon-like brightness. As its chorus yields to a soulful murmur intercepted by chiming bells, the mood cuts through with a hymn’s primal immediacy.
A few tracks later, ‘Edge of Reason’ drives that same existential awe up to further heights. Drifting on the tidal flow and ebb of the song’s bassline, Cale’s vocals take on a new softness. ‘Seeing mankind is, oh, not so kind,’ he sighs with a deep resignation that feels all the sadder for his age and experience, ‘we tear it all apart’.
When that voice blooms into a surging, multi-tracked one-man choir at the song’s climactic bridge, the effect is overwhelming. Its cosmic scope recalls his 1990 Brian Eno collaboration ‘Spinning Away’, a euphoric ode to Van Gogh’s The Starry Night about a hundred times more moving than Don McLean’s maudlin ‘Vincent’.
‘Edge of Reason’ may be a paean to pessimism, but although Poptical Illusion grew from the introspection Cale turned towards during lockdown, the album is far from a chronicle of doom. The jolly ‘Davies and Wales’ is a playful pseudo-disco tribute to his birth country, its languid guitar line shimmering up and down over a pertly popping mechanical staccato.
‘How We See the Light’ is another optimistic offering, and the most obvious ‘festival number’ here. It’s a panoramically positive sway-along-sing-along whose steady piano, squashy electronic percussion, and sunny guitar make surprising gestures towards 90s bubblegum (dare I say, a kind of ‘Steal My Sunshine’ grown stately).
‘It’s a lot like magic,’ the song begins, ‘it’s a lot like friendship’. These words may well come off daft and soppy in a younger mouth, but Cale’s authoritative delivery gives them an earnest dignity. His charismatic Carmarthenshire-New York accent, weathered by the decades from a refined purr to a pleasingly craggy growl, is once again multi-tracked into stentorian hugeness, and here it’s far more comforting than it is imposing.
‘All to the Good’ is cosier still. Though a peculiar robotic shuffle sprinkles grit in the gears of what is otherwise a twinkling, soufflé-light confection, Cale’s voice soars upwards with heartfelt charm as he sings ‘it’s so nice to have you here’. That is, until he speaks those same words in a stagey, declarative boom which may or may not carry a faint sarcastic tang.
Even at their cheeriest, the moods that Cale paints throughout Poptical Illusion are rarely straightforward. Rather than cynically forcing the listener towards predetermined emotions, his songs live by what you bring to them, and he tests your reactions through his favourite tool of repetition.
Take the nimble dripping-stalactite rhythms of ‘Calling You Out’. They may suggest impish mischief but the more they recur and build, the more sinister they grow, as if you’re turning dizzying circles in a subterranean cave.
Then there’s ‘I’m Angry’. ‘I’m hanging out to dry again’, Cale laments, suggesting a loathing directed more towards himself than the rest of the world. Its repeated organ notes, faltering and tentative, build maddening tension in a perfect evocation of lockdown’s queasy, purgatorial waiting-room feeling.
Still, he can’t keep us in suspense forever, and this darkness inflames into something fiercer and nastier across the second half of the record. Cale intones the lyrics of the discordant ‘Company Commander’ like a high-ranking Dalek until the song bursts off its hinges in a whirlpool of murky, bubbling techno.
‘Funkball the Brewster’ grows even tougher to digest. Shaky, tiptoeing chords pick out a bed for ghostly moans and wails, which come off as comparatively easy listening when the song gets swamped in a haze of brassy drones recalling Michael Nyman at his most funereal. Oh, and Cale starts to scream his lungs out. Sleep tight!
These more difficult numbers are fully worth your patience. ‘Setting Fires’ is a kaleidoscope of clashing rhythms, of stuttering electronic drums and ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ synths, but whenever they hit harmonic sweet spots, the effect is lovely.
In a particularly catchy example of damaged pop, ‘Shark-Shark’ hammers out a grindingly repetitive industrial-blues groove through layers on layers of metallic production. Though such density of sound might seem too muddled and dry to work, as it pounds along it becomes irresistibly, magically hypnotic, carrying you away for as long as you can cling to the life raft of that driving central thrum.
When Poptical Illusion draws to a close with ‘There Will Be No River’ after a solid hour of music, we get the grand send-off that such an ambitious, resonant, personal, and intelligent record deserves. Alongside foggy woodwinds hooting mournfully over a winding piano, Cale’s warm tones make the song appear centuries old.
‘Who would’ve thought we were done?’ he sings. ‘We’ve been here so many times before.’ It’s an appropriate lyric to cap off an album which sees this legendary figure reflecting on his long career and pulling a multitude of lessons from his past, while continuing to push himself beyond it. Cale may be best known for his work with other musicians, but in Poptical Illusion – dolorous and witty, perplexing and inspirational, compassionate and dark – he’s given us something which sounds gloriously like himself.
Poptical Illusion is out now via Double Six / Domino – listen and download via John Cale’s official website
John Cale socials: Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | X | YouTube
Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by Madeline McManus
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