'Mercy' by John Cale
Besides being the best collaborator Lou Reed ever knew, and a producer who helped introduce the world to Patti Smith and Iggy Pop, John Cale is an artist who eagerly intertwines his avant-garde background and classical training with affection for popular music.
Mercy, his first album of new, original music since 2012’s Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, emphasizes ambience and reflectiveness but also moves with questing restlessness. It’s a roiling stream of consciousness, and Cale refuses to float carelessly upon it.
Nor does he navigate it alone: he begins with the title track, a seven-minute exploration constructed primarily from a synthesizer duet between him and American electronica creator Laurel Halo, Cale’s voice sometimes distorted like a warped tape and sometimes ghostly like a spirit moved by the trip-hop beats.
Other fellow navigators include East Coast experimental group Animal Collective, which amplifies the orchestral-dub disquiet of “Everlasting Days”; Colombian-heritage singer Tei Shi, who soars huskily near the lustrous backdrop of “I Know You’re Happy”; and English post-punk band Fat White Family, which sharpens the jagged splinters of “The Legal Status of Ice.”
With confidence formed from decades of experience, Cale writes all the music and words on Mercy; he also co-produces with longtime associate Nita Scott and arranges all the strings. Yet he exercises this control with a light hand, allowing tracks like the ruminative “Noise of You” and the Steely Dan-slinky “Night Crawling” to develop as if crystallizing and to fade as if deliquescing.
Cale’s emotions crystallize, too: “Moonstruck (Nico’s Song)” honors his Velvet Underground bandmate with stern honesty and careful grace, long after her 1988 death, while “Story of Blood” flows from heart and circulatory system to the soul as the estimable Weyes Blood supplies indie-chanteuse backing vocals.
If Mercy is nevertheless not his most accessible work, that could be deliberate. John Cale is 80 and still thinking and learning, and his latest album is an introspective invitation for any listener to do the same.
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