John Cale – Mercy (2023) [FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

John Cale - Mercy (2023) [FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz] Download

What does John Cale have that the rest of us don’t—some gene that engenders infinite restlessness, a rapacious mind that is never satisfied? For nearly 60 years, or at least since he was a young Welshman who moved to New York and joined The Velvet Underground, Cale has been reinventing his music with dazzling and inspiring regularity. Once again, here is Cale, reimagining how his music is made, sounds, and even works. His engrossing 12-track MERCY—his first full album of new tunes in a decade—moves through true dark-night-of-the-soul electronic blues toward vulnerable love songs and hopeful considerations for the future with the help of some of music’s most curious young minds.Now in his ninth decade on Earth, John Cale has always been a collaborator. From his earliest and most experimental days working alongside La Monte Young and the complementary-but-challenging creative relationship he had with Lou Reed, on through his post-Velvets work with everyone from Terry Riley and Squeeze to Brian Eno and Danger Mouse, Cale is probably the only artist who worked with both Nick Drake and the Stooges—and absolutely the only one for whom it seems completely natural. Still, as he recently turned 80, it may be understandable for one to look at the lineup of guests on MERCY—crowded as it is with fashionable contemporary-ish artists like Animal Collective, Sylvan Esso, Fat White Family, Weyes Blood, and others—and think that Cale may have decided to lean back and let the cool kids take the wheel for an art-rock take on Santana’s Supernatural. Nothing could be further from the truth; this is very much a John Cale album, aligning (as much as a John Cale album can) with its most immediate predecessors. The last decade or so has found Cale working more with noisy, electronic textures, and MERCY bristles with a dark and dissonant futurism. It is—much like FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE, the most recent release from longtime co-conspirator Brian Eno—a deeply pessimistic record, touching on the unique perils of our recent dystopianism as well as the inevitable reckoning with one’s mortality. While a couple of solo numbers like “NOISE OF YOU” are gentle and straightforward, Cale is working in a decidedly out-there mode for much of the record, bringing along his collaborators for the ride. Whether utilizing them as faint filigree (Sylvan Esso’s voices barely register as an echo in the shadow of Cale’s powerful singing on “TIME STANDS STILL”) or allowing their eccentricities to tilt the axis of a song’s vibe (the way that Animal Collective manage to interpolate the melody of “Video Killed the Radio Star” makes “EVERLASTING DAYS” feel a whole lot less morbid than it actually is), there’s a clear two-way street with these interactions. Perhaps the most tantalizing is “MARILYN MONROE’S LEGS (beauty elsewhere)” with Actress, a track that starts out as glitchy, dissociated ambience, only to coalesce into a muscular piece of driving electronic art with Cale’s voice barely holding on. Throughout, Cale approaches this work like an artist half his age; he is continually challenging himself (and his listeners and collaborators) with work that’s always adventurous, occasionally beautiful, a bit unpleasant at times, but never dull. – Jason Ferguson

Tracklist:

1-1. John Cale – MERCY (07:00)
1-2. John Cale – MARILYN MONROE’S LEGS (beauty elsewhere) (06:53)
1-3. John Cale – NOISE OF YOU (05:15)
1-4. John Cale – STORY OF BLOOD (07:31)
1-5. John Cale – TIME STANDS STILL (05:20)
1-6. John Cale – MOONSTRUCK (Nico’s Song) (05:31)
1-7. John Cale – EVERLASTING DAYS (05:02)
1-8. John Cale – NIGHT CRAWLING (04:53)
1-9. John Cale – NOT THE END OF THE WORLD (06:17)
1-10. John Cale – THE LEGAL STATUS OF ICE (07:24)
1-11. John Cale – I KNOW YOU’RE HAPPY (05:15)
1-12. John Cale – OUT YOUR WINDOW (05:13)

Download:

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