When an icon returns after a lengthy absence, it’s tempting to feel a kind of condescending compassion. My god, one might think, he’s still doing it at 80. And when he returns in the enviable company of bright young(er) things, it’s tempting to feel cynical: Look who’s trying to stay current. Spare all that for John Cale. He who, in co-founding the Velvet Underground, built the bridge between European art music and American rock’n’roll with his inimitable viola drone; who managed to corral early iterations of the Stooges, Patti Smith, the Modern Lovers, and Nico into the studio and keep them there long enough to capture on tape all their world-changing energies; who introduced Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to Jeff Buckley, and after him, vicariously, to a deluge of lessor idol tryouts; who has himself released more than three dozen albums of chamber pop, post-punk, post-rock, and beyond, on his own and in collaboration with fellow icons, arguably more famous than him (frenemies Lou Reed and Brian Eno, gurus like La Monte Young), whom he often shows up—John Cale doesn’t need your charity.
In a 60-year career full of unexpected twists, Cale arrives with another: MERCY, an album informed by R&B and smeared with dream-pop haze and orchestral rumblings of apocalyptic terror. Yes, there’s a dream team of collaborators that reads like a festival main stage: Weyes Blood, Sylvan Esso, Animal Collective, Dev Hynes, and Tei Shi. Electronic producers Actress, Laurel Halo, TOKiMONSTA, and Seven Davis Jr. offer avant-cred. Fat White Family also appear. None stand a chance of upstaging Cale, and none try. MERCY is Cale’s album alone, haunted and reckoning with a turbulent past that, day by day, looks more peaceful than the future.
His voice remains unmistakable, a walnut burl with cracks in the grain. The stentorian register that Cale used to wield with authority is absent. Chart the distance between its apotheosis, 1973’s classic “Paris 1919,” and MERCY standout “Time Stands Still.” In both songs, Europe has collapsed (this time, it’s “sinking in the mud”), and in both, the Church comes to save the day. Fifty years ago, Cale could imagine himself as the religious force. “I’m the church/And I’ve come/To claim you with my iron drum,” he sang, his voice like cold steel. Today, he just mourns the church’s “savagery” in a voice wafting through a cathedral of Sylvan Esso’s echoes and murmurs. The drums are uncertain, doubling back like leather heels approaching and retreating on a hard stone floor. Only in the bridge does that old voice return, and instead of enlightenment, there’s environmental chaos. Roses battle poppies for the sun, and “monsoons (are) happening everywhere, even in your own backyard.” Vanishing footsteps signify love and loss in the gorgeous “Noise of You”; Cale, suspended in blankets of synths and vintage keys the exact color of a dusk snowstorm, longs to hear them once again. “Was so long, long ago,” he hollers. A string section flutters tremendously, a scarf that could form a noose.