When John Cale labored alongside Lou Reed in the Velvet Underground, he wasn’t precisely a shrinking violet. Cale matched his bandmate step for convention-shattering step, using his avant-garde coaching to kick up a righteous ruckus on viola (amongst different axes) and co-writing some significantly confrontational tunes.
However when Cale went solo initially of the 70s, he appeared to shake off plenty of the grit and dirt of his VU days. His first three solo albums, Classic Violence, The Academy in Peril, and Paris 1919, whereas not missing in adventurousness, had been filled with neoclassical gestures, tuneful chamber-pop preparations, and haunting balladry.
Take heed to John Cale’s Concern now.
When Cale converted to Island Information, one thing shifted inside him. Perhaps it was the acceleration of his infamous urge for food for managed substances, or his dive into the deep water as producer for Nico’s darkish night time of the soul The Finish, or perhaps he merely determined it was time to get his freak on once more.
Regardless of the impetus, Cale pulled out his previous black magic playbook and went to city, churning out three albums busting with gloriously unhealthy vibes for Island within the house of a single 12 months. The ball started rolling with 1974’s appropriately entitled Concern.
John Cale’s Concern
The front-loaded album leads off with the almost-title monitor, “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend,” one of the commanding songs in John Cale’s catalog. Over ominously insistent piano pounding, Cale comes off like a TV horror host, delighting in dragging you thru the ugly muck, introducing himself by the use of the couplet, “I’m a sleeping dog but you can’t tell/When I’m on the prowl you’d better run like hell” and calmly declaring, “We’re already dead but not yet in the ground.” By the coda, the track’s comparatively stately tempo devolves into musical mayhem, with a berserk Cale screaming the title phrase many times.
There’s nothing else as overtly unhinged on Concern, or the album can be given away free with a replica of the DSM. The truth is, Cale peppers the report with a number of of the superbly ghostly ballads he appears to have the ability to spin out at will. “Buffalo Ballet” serenely captures the event of the American West, with an virtually ecclesiastical refrain contrasting the ugliness that regularly seeps into the story. It’s been coated a number of instances through the years, by Paul Kelly & The Messengers, The Walkabouts, and others.
A bittersweet remembrance of an previous flame, “Emily” is as shut as Cale will get to a straight-up love ballad though he’s clearly tenting it up a tad, going as far as to fill the background with ocean sound results. The sprightly sparkle of “Ship of Fools” is immediately at odds with the lyric’s nightmarishly surreal travelogue, which shifts halfway by way of from America to Cale’s native Wales.
However by no means thoughts the ballads, right here’s John Cale in creepy mode. The exaggeratedly bouncy groove of “Barracuda” makes the macabre chorus “the ocean will have us all” and the weird bumblebee viola solo appear all of the extra unsettling. “Gun” is the album’s hardest rocker, a first-person account of a sociopathic felony’s death-dealing exploits enlivened even additional when Brian Eno feeds the already manic guitar solo by way of his synth for some brain-melting outcomes.
“The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy” is Cale at his most sardonic, mixing 50s R&B pastiche with a story of suppressed lechery as he spars with a spoken feminine vocal encouraging him to let all of it hang around. Cale unspools bone-deep cynicism on “You Know More Than I Know,” rating himself one of many world’s “angry whores” and envisioning his dying “among the weeds that creep into the hearts of all the weak.”
Cale ends Concern with a whiplash-inducing left flip, utterly upending any impressions you might need developed over the earlier 36 minutes. The epically twisted “Momamma Scuba” is a lurid, tongue-in-cheek come-on to a feminine scuba diver, with Richard Thompson’s razor-wire guitar solo gleefully slicing a gap in Cale’s air hose.
There have been extra sojourns by way of sadism, subversion, and sheer perversion to return in Cale’s temporary however fruitful Island stint. However Concern acquired the triptych off to a deliciously deranged begin.
Take heed to John Cale’s Concern now.
