John Cale — Mercy
Qobuz new release review (January 2023)
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.
