FILTER ALBUMS
Throwing shades
Eminent contrarian tells more ghost stories on first album of new material for a decade.
By Victoria Segal.
John Cale
★★★★
Mercy
DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
WHEN NOT fighting demons, John Cale has often encouraged ghosts. Paris 1919’s Shining-like time-travel; Songs For Drella’s séance-like communion with Andy Warhol; M: FANS, his radical 2016 reworking of his 1982 album Music For A New Society, complete with a sample of his late mother Margaret singing a Welsh folk song. Cale might have been trained in the experimental, becoming a catalyst for the new, but he’s still willing to dive back into time and memory. “It’ll haunt you for the rest of your life,” he sang on 1970’s Ghost Story; Mercy capturing just some of the unshakable phantoms that build up over 80 years.