Whoa, not just uptempo but upbeat. I found the bubbliness of "Been There, Done That" off-putting on initial listens of Wrong Way Up, but the pure popness and charming personality of the song eventually won me over.
It helps that the extremely complex, contrapuntal arrangement, which feels like a wall of noise at first, resolves into a beautiful mosaic on further examination. The percussive bassline, the drip-drop electronic percussion, electric piano, lead and backing voices (etc. etc.) all intertwine with clean precision - there is no mush here whatsoever.
It also helps that Cale gives one of his most accomplished pop vocals. There doesn't seem to be much to the lyrics, but there's enough to evoke interesting thoughts and images. There seems to be Eno influence in the lyrics, but as I've said before, I just can't tell what's Cale and what's Eno on this album. All I know is that it's great stuff.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Been There, Done That
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Lay My Love
You know, the first time I put on Wrong Way Up, I wasn't much impressed. It sounded fairly staid, simple, uninteresting. I loved "Cordoba," sure, and liked "One Word" just fine. But starting with "Lay My Love," the album's simplicity was trancey, rather boring, and quite disappointing - it wasn't what I wanted from a dream-team pairing like John Cale and Brian Eno.
That's how I felt for quite some time. One by one, songs clicked (and this was one of the first), until I could comfortably call this one of my favorite Cale albums. And it's an album you can play for the less... adventurous listeners in your life, too - who'd have thought that the two weird guys from two really weird bands would come up with music that sounds so nice?
"Lay My Love" is a patently Enoid song, so I don't want to dwell too much on it. (I can't speak for you, but I've got to love a song whose first lyric is "I am the crow of desperation" and which goes on to anoint the narrator "the termite of temptation - I multiply and fly my population.") But Cale's viola contributions here really make the song, giving it a complexity of feeling that sustains an otherwise fairly uninteresting piece of music. Does it want to be frenetic? Does it want to be soothing? Does it want to be tense or comforting? It's up to the viola to keep all of those questions unanswerable.
(There's a live cover of the song by Poi Dog Pondering available on iTunes and elsewhere around the 'net - a great take and eminently worth a listen.)
Monday, March 31, 2008
Palanquin
Another "One Word" b-side and North American Wrong Way Up bonus track, "Palanquin" is unquestionably Cale and Cale alone. If it it's not... well, I'll eat my hockey mask.
Why am I so sure? (The plastic may be hard on your teeth, but it's the padding that really discourages taking a bite.) I'm sure because it's a solo piano instrumental, the sort of rolling poco ritardando composition with light counterpoint and right and left hand voices moving in unison. But listening to it again...
Well, there's some synth in the background. There's no reason Cale couldn't have added that, really. He's perfectly capable of the trick of hiding the synth in plain view as part of the chord the piano is slowly exploring, then letting it peek out from behind the keyboard just when you've been lulled into thinking there isn't anything there...
But when the bubbling chimes come out to usher the piece to a close, precipitating out of the synth so naturally, irresistibly, inexorably... that's when I start thinking about what kind of condiment is appropriate for polyurethane.
No idea what this track has to do with human-powered transportation, though. (Chomp chomp.)
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Grandfather's House
Like "Cordoba," Wrong Way Up outtake and One Word b-side Grandfather's House uses lyrics taken verbatim from Spanish in Three Months, a textbook from the Hugo language series. Like Cordoba, "Grandfather's House" seems to tell a story of crime - this time, the story of a white-collar criminal from a good family. It's as detail-oriented as Cordoba, recounting family activities, dinners, flights and scenery. It conjures up a very intriguing story for me: the man, whose grandfather was a magistrate who oversaw the construction of the city's courthouse, embezzled money from his employer (the city?) to relieve his financial woes. I don't know what Cale and Eno saw in the text, but that's my reading. As with Cordoba, many gradations of meaning can be read into this small patch of found text.
Unlike Cordoba, though, it lacks a convincing musical development. It seems as if they couldn't figure out the right way to approach the song, so they just threw their favorite techniques and noises at it: stop-start construction, tinkling synth, electric piano, ethereal guitar, bass, a background drone. The vocal melody steals liberally from Music for a New Society's "Broken Bird," but the performance recalls Last Day on Earth's "Broken Hearts" - unctuous, rich, with an uncomfortable feeling of insecurity (or insincerity?). The song's one transcendent moment: the wordless Eno/Cale duet with viola accompaniment on the middle eight.
Since this track wasn't included on the US release of Wrong Way Up, and since the CDEP is long out of print, I'll post an MP3. It didn't deserve a spot on the album, but it's worth hearing. Enjoy.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Spinning Away
To be honest, I don't really think Cale had much to do with "Spinning Away", a beautiful little song from Wrong Way Up. It's a song about sketching under a dark night sky: feeling the earth turn, watching the dome of the sky move. It's just a moment in time, but it conveys the feeling terribly well. It has Eno all over it.
So why discuss it, given that I said I was only doing the obvious "John Cale" songs from collaborative albums? Well, it illustrates a certain lack in Cale's own oeuvre. Cale's songs are always about people. There are a few minor exceptions: "Big White Cloud," a cute little Vintage Violence track (but that sounds more like an LSD trip log), "Lie Still , Sleep Becalmed" (the vastness and scale is right, but the words aren't his). In general, though, if nature or the universe at large intrudes upon a song, as in "Barracuda", it's only as a tableau to put actors in front of.
Cale isn't interested in engaging with the non-human world on a personal level; for all that he illustrates the defects of human relationships, he never really goes beyond them. Which is fine, as there are lots of awful "awestruck" songs about the world, and anything that prevents atrocities like "Be the Rain" is alright by me. But in a forty-year songwriting career that has covered many recherché topics and many genres, the absence seems a little strange.
Advertisement! The peak of the Perseid meteor shower is this weekend. If you're in the northern hemisphere and can escape light pollution, consider heading somewhere dark and looking up. Brian Eno would want you to.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Cordoba
I tend to prefer accessible Cale. While I first heard this song on the excellent and accessible Fragments of a Rainy Season, it wasn't until I heard the studio original that "Cordoba" really grabbed me. The live version may technically be superior, but I can't say I prefer it. The studio take of "Cordoba" unfolds with a quiet, eerie menace; while I grokked that something bad was going down in the Fragments version, in the sense that something bad is almost always going down in a John Cale song, the Wrong Way Up track grabbed my attention, made me sit up and say, "What the heck is happening here?"
Bombs in suitcases are happening, from the sound of things. This one ranks with Talking Heads' "Listening Wind" as a tune you probably shouldn't be blasting on the car radio whilst going through a border crossing. And especially on the coda, it shows how subtle Cale can be more powerful than angry, screaming Cale; compare the recitation of "the lift stops between two floors... I'll walk towards the station... you walk towards the bus" on here with the more ranty vocals on Fragments. The quiet, detached, perhaps faintly sorrowful vocals on the studio track hint at something horrible yet inevitable-- events are in motion, and cannot now be stopped. It's a cinematic sequence, highly visual in the way many great Cale moments are. The tinkling little backing track reminds me somehow of the ending theme of Koyaanisqatsi (the bit with the burning satellite), and the resemblance to a music box gone wrong makes it all the more affecting. So, while the Fragments "Cordoba" may be another solid track off a stellar live album, I'll take the flawed but involving original.
See a slow and ghostly performance from Amsterdam in 2004 at Fabchannel or listen to the audio:
