John Cale: Hobo Sapiens

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Cale's lengthy post-Velvet Underground career has been as wayward and demanding as it has been urgent and rewarding. He's sometimes been a spume-spewing anarcho-political punk rocker (Sabotage), at others the patrician Welshman with a soul closer to Dylan Thomas whose poems he has sometimes set to music.

Classically trained and delivering from that corner, guitar abusing, or poetic? All bets are off when a new Cale album arrives. This, coincidentally coming as Tim Mitchell's informative if still frustratingly detached biography Sedition and Alchemy hits bookshelves, finds the access-all-areas musician on a new tangent, possibly courtesy of co-producer Nick Franglen of Lemon Jelly whose last album set a new threshold for pastoral Anglo-ambience and electronica.

That has rubbed off here in the backdrops of tracks like Look Horizon (the title of which owes something to the last LemJell album title Lost Horizons) and electronic touches throughout, but it's still Cale's show. You can't imagine anyone else delivering the spooky, droning Caravan, the cello-scraped and unnerving Magritte or the churning and foreboding Letter From Abroad where "they're cutting their heads off on the soccer field".

Or Things - which references helpmate Brian Eno ("gearing up to take Tiger Mountain") - and Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead which comes in two treatments: one almost poppy and upbeat, the other dark and disturbing.

Cale has always had a worldview (often slightly misanthropic) so his lyrics take you to Zanzibar and Paris as effortlessly others might write about their local park. Typically, dark undercurrents are everywhere so here are dictators, empty eyes, thin lips and something rattling in the closet.

Seldom an easy listen, Cale at 61 is proving he still has much to say and is capable of finding fresher ways of doing it than those half his age, many of whom would hail VU but not dare follow that band's formidable presence down this less-travelled road.

This warrants serious attention from those prepared for a dark ride.


Label: EMI