John Cale - MERCY

Double LP

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. To wit, in those early days of fundamentally
changing rock 'n' roll, he was also making ecstatic viola drones and playing with La Monte Young's
epochal ensemble. There was the bewitching chamber folk of Paris 1919 (1973) followed instantly by
the gnarled rock of Fear (1974), the provocative and spare song cycle Music for a New Society (1982)
followed more than 30 years later by mighty and unabashed electronic updates.

Are there straight lines between collaborators Lou Reed and Danger Mouse and Sharon Van Etten, or between the avant-garde of downtown New York in the '60s and that of the Internet right now other than John Cale? Once again, here is Cale, reimagining how his music is made, sounds, and even works. His engrossing12-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.

Laurel Halo, Sylvan Esso, Animal Collective: They're but half of the astounding cast here, brilliant musicians who climb inside Cale's consummate vision of the world and help him redecorate there. Cale turned 80 in March, and he's watched as many peers and pals have passed away, particularly during the last decade. But Mercy isn't some late-in-life Hail Mary for relevance so much as the continuation of a long career's work with wonder. Cale has always searched for new ways to explore old ideas of alienation, hurt, and joy; Mercy is the latest transfixing find of this unsatisfied mind.

If it's Mercy John Cale wants, he's created it not only through these 12 songs but through a lifetime of perpetual self-renewal.

 

1. MERCY - feat. Laurel Halo

2. MARILYN MONROE'S LEGS (beauty elsewhere) - feat. Actress

3. NOISE OF YOU

4. STORY OF BLOOD - feat. Weyes Blood

5. TIME STANDS STILL - feat. Sylvan Esso

6. MOONSTRUCK (Nico's Song)

7. EVERLASTING DAYS - feat. Animal Collective

8. NIGHT CRAWLING

9. NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

10. THE LEGAL STATUS OF ICE - feat. Fat White Family

11. I KNOW YOU'RE HAPPY - feat. Tei Shi

12. OUT YOUR WINDOW

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