Octogenarian Rock
On John Cale's 'MERCY'
MERCY, John Cale’s latest record, is a cutting edge piece of 21st century music. Trap beats, pulsing bass lines, eerily empty soundscapes—these are hallmarks of high school SoundCloud savants, not octogenarian legends of the avant-garde. It’s a startling achievement, in more ways than one.
Listening to the record here at the start of a new year, I realize these sounds are completely alien to me at the moment, as if music made up of these component parts is ipso facto less than. John’s work here proves that isn’t true. Music made today can mean and achieve just as much as music made in the past. So with that in mind, I’m trying something different here on the Jokermen Substack: rather than talk about old records, I’m going to write about new ones. There may well be more coming here in the future, but for the time being it’s plain and simple. No rating system, no advertisements, no paywall: just words about music. Kinda like a podcast, only you have to read it.
You spend The Great California Atmospheric River Procession of 2023 listening to MERCY, a very new record by a very old man. Long grey days extend endlessly into one another, no textural difference to mark the passing of time save the intensity of the rain falling endlessly against your windows, in the gutters, on your dog’s rain slicker as she hunches over the mulch to take a resentful shit, as if the weather was your fault personally. The music matches the tenor of life: long songs that begin and end arbitrarily, little rhythm by which to orient yourself, a grey opaque cast to the whole thing. Bad times demand bad vibes. After your second listen, you text Evan “every song sounds identical. but like in a cool way”.
The days wear on and the storms roll in off the Pacific over the bay and east across the Central Valley, up the Sierras, out on to the endless plain of fortune, and the record begins to reveal itself. “Noise of You” turns out to be something like a dance song, crystal clear percussion track and intermittent melody nudging you into nodding your head. Halfway thru a modulated John comes to the forefront: “Was so long, long ago / Was so long, long ago, so long / I hear you, I hear you now, / I hear you now.” The lyrics are as obscure as ever, as legible as anything on Helen of Troy, but the visceral reaction is something new.
Here’s this man and this voice, the very same voice that related the ballad of Waldo Jeffers in a shitbox studio in Manhattan half a century ago. Today he’s aided by state-of-the-art sound processing software, yes, but that doesn’t matter, is perhaps even the point, part of it at least: the unfathomable feats made mundane over the course of a career that stubbornly, through all the hockey masks and cocaine and commercial disappointments, refuses to end.
“Moonstruck (Nico’s Song)” becomes his “Roll On John,” an elegy for a fellow artist lost decades ago, in another life. The song marches in on a storm of strings, cellos and violas and a double bass, sounds as evocative of John as his stentorian delivery. But check the credits; turns out he wasn’t responsible for any of these parts. He’s credited for “synths,” “pianos,” a “Swarmatron,” even “noises,” but the strings are the work of other—presumably younger—parties, those with nimble hands and less arthritic joints. There’s something touching about it, the substitutions and schemes demanded by the predictable failure of the body. This is inhuman music with a blood red heart.
The list of guests reads like the second day of a festival with a discerning booking team: Weyes Blood, Animal Collective, Dev Hynes, Sylvan Esso, Actress, Tei Shi, Laurel Halo. John’s made dozens of records over the last sixty years, but never has he enlisted such a broad stable of collaborators for a single release. Eno joined for the Island records, Ratso on Artificial Intelligence, and Lou, unforgettably, on Drella, but this time he seems to have approached each song individually, as if it was its own record with its own raison d’etre and direction. The cumulative effect is charming, verging on quaint. It reminds you of early CD-era albums, songs stacked on songs stacked on songs, as if the length of a record had any bearing at all on its quality; you almost expect two or three tortuously unfunny skits to have made the cut.
But they haven’t. It’s a dense LP filled with dense music, something clearly conceived of as a grower, one for the long run. It takes time to feel your way through, stumble from one song through another and out the other side. It asks you to be patient, and why not? You’re not 80, you’re not even halfway there. You have all the time in the world.
The album concludes with the two most straightforward, and straightforwardly beautiful, songs here. “I Know You’re Happy” chugs along like Clinging to a Scheme-era Radio Dept., all pristine synths and elastic drumbeats, while John accuses someone—a lover? a friend? you yourself?—of schadenfreude: “I know you’re happy when I’m sad.” Despite the charge, it’s one of the brightest vibes on the record, as if taking pleasure in his pain isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He knows more than you know, as ever.
“Out Your Window” concludes things, fittingly, with conclusions. Riding an insistent piano riff that can’t help but echo “Runaway” (still an all-time banger after all these years and antisemitic rants), John makes a simple, simply impossible request: “Please, please don’t go”; “If you’re wanting to go, take me with you / Please, please come home.” It rhymes neatly with Bob’s sentiments on Rough and Rowdy Ways, on his greatest-ever love song: “Lotta people gone, lotta people I knew”; “I’ll lay down besides you when everyone’s gone.” The world’s first eightysomething rock stars are reckoning with death the only way they know how—through rock songs. This is bravery and bravado, an act of defiance that puts the lie to that old chestnut, that rock music is a young person’s game. Rock music is ageless. It belongs to us all, is the folk music of our age, is folk music itself, if you look at it the right way. All it asks is that you have something to say.
You’re going to put MERCY away for a while. The rain is gone now, days growing longer. The Sierras are gleaming white, snowpack levels already well over the April 1 average. In San Francisco the sun is shining, coaxing green shoots out of the ground. They say you’re in for a beautiful spring. You want to listen to the fun stuff while the world is suited for it, Caribbean Sunset and Walking on Locusts and Wrong Way Up. The bad times are only ever so far off, are well on their way already. You’ll be looking for mercy soon enough.