About halfway through John Cale, a 1998 BBC documentary about the Welsh experimental rock authority, the focus shifts to the beauty of its subject’s home. "There are certain patterns of behavior you pick up when you’re young that never leave you, moments of tranquility that you get when you’re young that are always the most valuable," drawls Cale in voiceover, a soft and pliable topnote to the tender folk song underneath. The camera swoons over leaves rustling under a waterfall, cattle trotting benignly through verdant fields. "That sense of nostalgia is always with you, because it’s a way of inuring you against the passage of time." The film then smash-cuts to a white cow wedged into a slaughterhouse warren, eyes pleading as it’s shot in the skull, its throat is slit, and torrents of dark blood stream forth. It’s a transition of cruel and abrupt apathy, a needlessly gruesome pivot—Cale isn’t even present—and one that director James Marsh must have believed embodies Cale’s volatility throughout his long career.
Cale has long carved mercurial paths—first in the Velvet Underground, where his eerie bass, piano, and viola parts pushed the band toward the eccentric end of the art-rock spectrum, then as a producer, when he captured the raw spirits of the Stooges and Patti Smith on both artists’ classic debut albums. The 73-year-old’s 15 solo albums touch on protopunk and classical and are niche to the point that some have been out of print for years; one of those works, 1982’s Music for a New Society, has been singled out as a pernicious lost masterpiece, the spare and depressive about-face to his agitpop screed of the previous year, Honi Soit.
When Music was finally reissued this year, it came bundled Jekyll-Hyde style with M:FANS, a new reworking of the album. The latter isn’t as hagiographic as the acronym suggests—Nick Zinner isn’t here shaking a tambourine or anything—but is rather Cale’s attempt to revisit bleak characters through a lens of rage instead of sorrow, as well as process the death of his occasional nemesis Lou Reed. Hearing both versions of the album together, especially by hopscotching to compare tracks directly, is a harrowing yet rewarding spree, not least because Cale’s originals often sound more modern than the new versions.
On Music for a New Society, sparse keyboard lines languish in chilly air, arid spaces imbued with acute confidence. Cale unfurls somber, detached appraisals of miserable lost souls, including mothers on murder sprees ("Taking Your Life in Your Hands") and loners exhaling their death rattles ("Sanctus (Sanities)"), atop deconstructed bleats of churchy organs and dissonant strings. There are wisps of tight pop melodies perched atop a confluence of oddities—"Thoughtless Kind," a spooky dirge, pairs a thickly processed a capella refrain ("The best of times/ With the thoughtless kind") with rough cackling and an agitating percussion line reminiscent of a ticking clock. "Close Watch," its title cribbed from Cale’s septuagenarian spirit animal Johnny Cash, anatomizes loneliness via plodding piano and decomposing bagpipe bursts. Aside from the lone straightforward rocker, "Changes Made," on which Allen Lanier of Blue Öyster Cult plays guitar, the semi-improvised record feels meticulously plotted and borderline intrusive—the most revealing scrawls yet from the solitary confinement of Cale’s fulminating mind.
M:FANS is less reclusive, just by virtue of its premise—Cale is collaborating with himself, the ultimate glum foil—but also because it fills every swatch of white space with his later-career electro-industrial leanings. That needling chronograph tick on "Thoughtless Kind" is now gregarious, beefy with fizzing synths and hyper-processed coos. Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors joins him to sing staccato microtones on "Close Watch," a brusque and R&B-leaning reimagining virtually unrecognizable from its weepy source material. "Sanctus (Sanities)" also proves malleable, Cale intoning a requiem of personal and general-interest doom ("It was a marriage made… in the grave!" is not the least histrionic line) over a driving mechanical stomp Nine Inch Nails would’ve relished. It’s a lot of futurism sourced from the '90s, which highlights Cale’s prescience in the first go-‘round.
Cale is clearly still curious as an artist; in recent years, he’s collaborated with Danger Mouse and represented the motherland at the Venice Biennale. Hell, he practically flirted with Bond villainy two years ago, when he commanded a horde of wasp drones onstage in London. Still, there’s a greater vigor, and a real lack of vanity, to releasing a notorious lost album and upending it in the same breath. That these projects work in tandem, three decades removed, gives nostalgia a good name.
