John Cale
Animal Justice

Three pieces three.

Only?

Only, but...

But?

They are two wonders and a masterpiece.

The first is amazing...

Starts with a parodic voice... then some clamor, screams, I don't know... twenty seconds almost like The Fall... and off to a magnificent punk'n'roll with coarse voice and killer guitars.

The title is “Chicken shit” and alludes to a crude and ironic act of performance art that went down in history as the chicken incident.

We are around 76/77, that is, the height of the punk era.

In the midst of “Heartbreak hotel”, a spine-tingling track par excellence, as well as a very dark cover of the Elvis classic, suddenly Cale takes a cleaver and pulls out an already dead chicken. Then, to the horrified eyes of the band members, he beheads the corpse of the beast.

Finally, he waves the bloody carcass over the front rows of the punks...

Panic...

Two of the band members, disgusted, leave the stage, the punks get agitated, and quite a lot. And Cale, visibly satisfied, thinks something like: “look at these simulators of violence who get agitated over two drops of blood.”

The result of the crazy happening is that the concert ends much earlier than expected.

“Memphis”, track two, a Chuck Berry cover, is another gem...oh damn these definitions, is it fine if I say it's some kind of glam wave, with guitar breaks à la Phil Manzanera? Anyway, very cool and great drive.

Well, what can I say, a deadly one-two.

Then the quantum leap, because track three is a whole different world...

“Hedda Gabler” is a monstrous track.

Let's say a ballad. Or maybe a radiodrama, a story suspended over music of the most delicate balances and even more subtle ripples. Pure essentiality, the abc of the nightmare, wicked grammar.

A shovel that slowly digs deep.

And anyway, one of those pieces capable, in an instant, of creating a tension that won't let you go...

How all this is exactly arranged, what the constituent elements are (from first to last) and in what quantities they are thrown into the pot is however a matter I leave to the most relentless musicologists and esotericists.

In any case, Hedda Gabler, which at the end releases all accumulated tension into a kind of deep slumber, is a track that seems to suggest to the punks of today and yesterday (and certainly to all of us) something like: okay chaos, okay noise, okay metal clatter, but the account of horror is built with something else.

Or even better: there’s another type of rock’n’roll, even if it seems apparently more suited to concert halls.

In short, there is a common denominator among the three pieces of this fantastic EP.

And it’s not strange at all.

After all, Cale is the man who took an Elvis classic and brought it to the other side. Only that, indeed, the other side is the same as before, even if it doesn’t seem.

And then “Hedda Gabler” is much scarier than a dead chicken. Or at least just as much...

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PS: The band members who left the stage were vegetarians...