|
| |
John Cale
HoboSapiens
(Or Music/EMI)
The Music Box's #9 album of 2004
First Appeared in The Music Box, October 2004, Volume 11, #10
Written by John Metzger
To say that HoboSapiens, John Cale’s latest effort and first American
release in eight years, is both a bizarre and eclectic affair is certainly an
understatement, but then again, it’s doubtful that the former member of
The Velvet Underground would have it any other way. Throughout his career, Cale has
straddled the line between avant-garde experimentalism and tunefully crafted pop
songs, and with the help of Pro Tools technology, he joins the creative
community of the 21st Century while remaining wholly himself. As
usual, his lyrics are darkly dour and more than just a little bit esoteric in
their construction, sketchily referencing everything from the fate of
Afghanistan to the unraveling of a world led into chaos by misguided American
foreign policy and everyone from the Greek mathematician Archimedes to the
Belgian painter René Magritte to cartoon icon Charlie Brown. However, it’s the
surrounding music — a series of near-perfect melodies, each of which is
effortlessly enveloped by a sensory-assaulting aural collage — that causes his
poetic words to become a three-dimensional world of splendiferous, Technicolor
wonder.
Fusing ponderous string arrangements, noisy guitars, creepy keyboards, and an
array of eerily disembodied vocals to a bed of percussive grooves, Cale sculpts
HoboSapiens into an atmospheric suite of songs that buzzes with enough
dissonance to be downright unsettling while also retaining an hypnotic quality
that is impossible to resist. Better still, beneath the densely packed layers of
whirring sound effects and space-age drum loops, the album features some rather
engaging tunes — most notably, the effervescent pop of Reading My Mind,
which obscures the drunken car crash enacted by its orbiting clatter, and the
dual versions of Thing, a perky ode to love and lust, that becomes a
melted mass of mayhem in its recasting as Things X — that would stand on
their own accord, even without the surreally psychedelic disarray. While there
are shades of recent works by David Bowie, David Byrne, and Peter Gabriel
scattered throughout the collection, all of which largely keep the set from
sounding as groundbreaking as many of Cale’s other outings, HoboSapiens
is both a remarkably solid effort as well as a welcome return from one of rock
’n‘ roll’s most intriguing architects. 
HoboSapiens is available
from Amazon.com. To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
Click Here!
For UK orders, please
Click Here!
Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2004
The Music Box
|
