"Say hello to the future, and goodbye to the past," declares John Cale on the first song on his new EP, and no doubt, he's earned the right to sing that line. For a good chunk of the past two years, Cale has been touring a front-to-back performance of his 1973 chamber-pop masterpiece Paris 1919, the most enduring and beloved album amid his sprawling post-Velvet Underground discography. Naturally, the process of revisiting a specific body of work night after night can't help but exert some influence on an artist's subsequent move, and Cale is no different. However, in the case of the Extra Playful EP-- Cale's first release in six years, and a teaser for a new full-length coming in 2012-- the Paris 1919 revival has seemingly inspired him not to revisit that album's orchestrated elegance, but to take a reactionary leap into the opposite direction, to further explore the deconstructed electronic productions and mechanized power pop heard on 2005's Black Acetate.
From an artist who's always evinced an adventurous spirit and sense of humor (however dry and dark it may be), the title Extra Playful is to be received as both a promise and a threat. The ideal here is a sort of absurdist, avant-garde take on adult-contemporary pop, feeding straight-forward, mid-tempo rock'n'roll songs and romantic balladry through synthetic sonics and alien frequencies. From the mellotron-like psychedelic textures that lend the endearing serenade "Whadda Ya Mean By That?" a woozy, weightless feel, to the Scary Monsters-esque freakazoid guitar squall that rips through the android funk of "Perfection", Cale takes considerable glee in destabilizing his songs' structures. To wit, the Francophone-sung trip-hop flashback "Pile a L'heure" would sound right at home on some circa-1996 chill-out compilation, were it not for an unnerving background drone that provides a distant echo of Cale's viola-scraping on the Velvets' "Venus in Furs".
But Cale's sense of playfulness can degenerate into cringe-inducing silliness, as on "Hey Ray", which works the same Beats-plus-beats formula as Black Acetate's equally ill-advised "Brotherman". As a satire of 1960s idealism, "Hey Ray" is actually pretty funny, as Cale plays call-and-response with his backing chorus, counting off each year from the decade before reducing it to a punchline: "1967-- it's the golden age/ 1968-- and it's all over!” (Tellingly, he stops short of calling out 1969, effectively dismissing the year of Woodstock, Manson, and the lunar landing as just another year with nothing to do.) As a song, however, "Hey Ray" is a sore-thumb irritant on an EP that otherwise carefully mediates between Cale's populist and deviant tendencies. That said, it's still guaranteed to be only the second worst thing a former member of the Velvet Underground will release this year.
