On "December Rain", the sixth song on John Cale's new album, Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, Cale sings a line about "Google getting on your nerves." He fails to elaborate, so we never find out what he thinks might irk us about Google: Google Docs (which frequently erases important data, I've noticed)? Google Reader (cramped, visually unappealing)? He just says "Google." The fact that he sings it through Auto-Tune gives the moment a whiff of parody. Cale has been on art-rock's cutting edge for decades; he's the only person at the center of the tag cloud "John Cage," "Aaron Copland," "Lou Reed," "Patti Smith," and "Sham 69." His cover of LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" rivals the original. You don't want to hear him sound out of touch.
Then, of course, there's that album title, which exists, magnificently, beyond the realm of normal taste and judgment. "Nookie Wood", to judge from Cale's heavy-breathing delivery on the titular song, is a dark, fearsome place where beasts roam and men are devoured whole. Nookie Wood is definitely strange, in other words. What it is not, sadly, is terribly interesting: Much like David Byrne and St. Vincent's recent Love This Giant collaboration, Shifty Adventures feels well-composed, immaculately arranged, and curiously inert.
Part of the problem comes from Cale's production choices, which feel less of this era than the late 1980s and early 90s: The boxy drum sounds, textured surface, and tacky-stiff keyboard sounds remind me, specifically, of Peter Gabriel's Us. The adult-contempo sheen doesn't do the songs here, which are crawling with interesting sounds, any favors. Cale works hard, banging pianos and MPCs, running drum sounds backwards, and filling the margins with glitches and loops. His viola snakes and mingles with often lightly Auto-Tuned voice. But the album's lacquered surface coats the chaos and imposes unwelcome order. It's like watching a man fail to tear his way out of an over-starched dress shirt.
If Cale had brought more memorable songs, Shifty Adventures might have fought its way out of this middle distance. But the songwriting is meandering and vague, feeling less written than whittled out of an arsenal of studio tricks. Like Brian Eno's recent solo work for Warp, Shifty Adventures has an all-frame, no-painting feeling: Lead single "I Wanna Talk 2 U" (co-produced by Danger Mouse), is rote, dutiful mid-tempo acoustic rock, without a single unexpected turn.
Cale sometimes pricks the air with a soulful line-- "I always held on to the thought/ That if they loved you long enough/ They'd find out what was missing when they finally called your bluff," is the mournful opening salvo on "Hemingway"-- but vast stretches of the album amble by without giving you a good reason to pay attention, other than to note a tactile, sticky-sounding drum loop here ("Face to the Sky") or a nice sunburst of acoustic guitars there ("Living With You"). This is what happens, sometimes, when a producer gets lost in the studio and forgets to write an album, and Shifty Adventures feels more like a collection of gadgets than songs.
