Music Banter - View Single Post - John Cale - A few albums
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Old 04-23-2009, 07:54 AM   #27 (permalink)
4ZZZ
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Big bump. Praise be to blog world. I have found an album of Cales that passed me by. I have been giving it a good play over the last couple of weeks.

Honi Soit. 1981.



Dead Or Alive
opens and we are treated to a vintage Cale song. Wonderful trumpet to start with Cale's singing at a peak. Good Guitar work along with solid rhythm make this a fine and melodic start. Excellent song. Strange Times In Casablanca follows and has Cale's talk/sing voice ripping through a rocker with synth sounds swishing away. Cale's career is littered with songs like this, lyrics that demand a listen, a standard rock beat and synth washes that give that slight experimental feel.
Fighter Pilot has female backing vocals with some sturdy lead guitar in the background. Wilson Joliet is Cale presenting his forte, a background viola drone and his plaintive then aggressive vocals with the usual odd lyrics that give him and edge over others of his vintage. Streets of Loredo is the only non Cale composition and is a Country folk standard given the Avant treatment.
Title track Honi Soit (La première Leçon De Français) has French lyrics and has a catchy chorus though odd male backing vocals. The interesting thing for this reviewer is that the song is seemingly a nod to the future in that it would not have been out of place on Hobo Sapiens or Black Acetate. Damn good song this.
Riverbank brings the tone back as we get a slow melancholy track.
Russian Roulette has one of those lyrics that has attracted me to Cale.

Well Delilah is your [envy flowing?]
Samson's shorn and hoarse
With fifty caliber bullets
For the [trutches??] in the human race
Japan, Japan, Japan, we love you
They carve you like Californian turkey
Feed to hungry missiles sucking
The moist vagina of the world
Leave it


This song rocks along and has fine guitar work that is both chunky and rhythmic. Cales mixes his singing and his speaking and just occasionally slurs his words and gets a bit of grunt into it.
Magic and Lies finishes with a melodic tune consisting of thumping piano, odd time changes and the usual enigmatic lyric.

This is a good album. It is probably just a rung below the Island years albums and the last 2 studio albums. It has the usual "problem" of being too experimental for those that are not of that ilk and the reverse for those that are. This makes Cale for me the most enigmatic of artists.
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