John Cale shares ‘How We See The Light’ and announces new album ‘POPtical Illusion’
John Cale has announced his new album ‘POPtical Illusion’ and shared its first single, ‘How We See The Light’ – listen to it below.
- READ MORE: The Velvet Underground review: revisionist doc reworks narrative of New York rock and rollers
The Velvet Underground founder and Welsh musician will release his next record on June 14 via Double Six/Domino, produced by Cale and longtime partner Nita Scott in Los Angeles. Pre-order/pre-save here.
A press release says that “Cale has often said that something shifted inside his mind during the pandemic, realizing that, nearing 80, he was living and working through something that many of his past contemporaries weren’t”.
It continued: “He wanted to document it. He wrote more than 80 songs in a period of a little over a year, collectively surveying the range of human experience in the process – humour bled into frustration, regret gave way to forgiveness, sadness tangled with surrealism.”
The statement also mentioned that Cale, a “hip-hop zealot”, was inspired by how the genre “wields technology to create multi-dimensional textures or build surprising melodies. ‘POPtical Illusion’ synthesises those emotions and enthusiasms into a dozen electronic playgrounds, Cale’s magisterial voice webbing across it all with puns and insights, grievances and quips, and some version of truth.”
Cale has shared the album’s first single, ‘How We See The Light’. He has also released an accompanying music video directed by Pepi Ginsberg of an unnerving day in the life of some papier-machê office workers. Tune in here:
The tracklisting for ‘POPtical Illusion’ is:
1. ‘God Made Me Do It (don’t ask me again)’
2. ‘Davies and Wales’
3. ‘Calling You Out’
4. ‘Edge of Reason’
5. ‘I’m Angry’
6. ‘How We See The Light’
7. ‘Company Commander’
8. ‘Setting Fires’
9. ‘Shark-Shark’
10. ‘Funkball the Brewster’
11. ‘All To The Good’
12. ‘Laughing In My Sleep’
13. ‘There Will Be No River’
‘POPtical Illusion’ will be Cale’s first music since last year’s ‘Mercy’, his first album in a decade. The record included Weyes Blood collaboration ‘Story of Blood’ and the single ‘Noise of You’.
The album also featured guest spots from Animal Collective, Fat White Family, Sylvan Esso, Laurel Halo, Tei Shi, Actress and more.
In other news, NME reviewed the Todd Haynes-directed Velvet Underground documentary in 2021, which we gave three stars: “Equally, some might think sanitising the story of the band that first found the beauty in hard reality an unforgivable act of revisionism, but Haynes isn’t interested in the dirt, the drugs or the decline towards ignominy, because it’s the beauty of this world that appeals to him, not the ugliness.
“More than 20 years later, and with 2015’s exceptional Carol under his belt, Haynes revisiting this subject, but with real Velvet Underground songs, footage and interviews – feels like a rite of passage.”
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Alex Rigotti
NME
