John Cale
Music For A New Society

There is a dark jewel, emitting reflections of a spectral light, embedded in the discography of John Cale.
There is a man, alone, in a room.

One of those large rooms with high ceilings, empty, where the objects that once defined the space have left ghosts in place of their presence. Shapes like shadows, of furniture and paintings, on the walls.
One of those rooms where sounds, voices, our very steps, acquire a natural reverberation.
That isolates and concentrates them. To the point that it seems like hearing them for the first time.

And there's an open window, through which, with a sudden gust, a breeze sneaks in. Making a curtain dance, inflating and sucking it back, like a breath.

The man is probably naked.
Or he is as if he were.
What we are about to hear now, the raw ration of himself he is about to serve, we have never heard before. And we will never hear it again. Never again like this.

The man is the same one who, a long time ago, in another life, saw his name become indissolubly linked to the yellow silhouette of a banana. He, the lanky figure armed with a viola, next to the man with the guitar and voice.
He is the same man who, portrayed in a white suit, a new Gatsby on the cover of "Paris 1919," presented us with his delicate, refined, and eclectic jewels.
The same one who then, just a year later, in "Fear," would raise his anthem, in the form of paranoid delirium, to fear. Man's best friend.

But today he is here, at an indeterminate point in the middle of his existence, in this empty space, in this new dimension.

With enough courage to overcome embarrassment and choose a title like "Music For A New Society."
And there are few sounds.
Those of a piano, or an organ.

Cale plays keyboards (often a liquid sound, as if dissolved), bass, guitar, viola.
In one track, we will even hear bagpipes.

But it is a contracted, measured use, careful to maintain in each episode the white space of silence that is created between the notes. Also to then use it, like an immaculate canvas, when within it the voice will explode, pushed to its most expressionistic forms, in a sort of catharsis.

And there are fragments of sounds that seem to arise from some jagged depth, from the bottom of a nightmare, crossing the void between the chords.

There is a sense of claustrophobia and tension, like in the presence of an imminent threat.
But also the feeling of an austere refuge, of a near liberation.
There is a lyricism that touches poetry, and a rawness that surpasses it. Which seems to realize that it will not be possible to find the same atmosphere again.

This, perhaps, is the last chance for the man alone in a room.

There is the "Ode to Joy" within "Damn Life," and something secret and magnificent, in the disorienting melodies of "Broken Bird" and "The Chinese Envoy."
There is the legacy of his classical training, within the folds of these songs.
There is also space for a "Changes Made" that recovers his rock inclination, but it is an isolated episode in the album's atmosphere.
There is the hypothesis of a modern, alien chamber music. For rooms gutted by lives crossed by pain and impossibility. Without the veil of modesty to conceal their folds.

Deposited, among the stripped-down music, by words sometimes almost declaimed, at other times sung with a poignant simplicity by this definitive voice.
Words that, on a couple of occasions ("If You Were Still Around" and "Risé, Sam and Rimsky Korsakov") are those of Sam Shepard.
And a voice that, on me, has always exerted a strange attraction. Here, even more so than elsewhere, it seems to have a deep and nervous body, at times almost in direct contact with mine.
In the ten tracks (eleven in the CD print) of this record, there is a mystery that, despite the time, I have not yet unraveled.

A cold but burning magnetism, capable of capturing, capable of tearing and emptying.

Something that reappears, each time, as if it were the first.
It is not possible to truly listen to it without accepting its overpowering urgency. Without entering the same room, into the same void.
For this reason, probably, I let it tell me when it's time.

Tonight it did.

It remains one of the truest, most imperfect, unrepeatable, and important records of the infamous '80s.
For me, for my '80s.


There is a dark jewel, which continues, almost twenty-five years later, to emit reflections of a unique and spectral light, embedded in the discography of John Cale.

OUT OF PRINT FOR A LONG TIME.
And, naturally, at absurd prices, online.

Screw them.

Even in this case, they have no excuses.
Trust the Mule.