"POPtical Illusion" John Cale's new release on June, 14

    Take a trip down memory lane with John Cale, and it’s unlikely to be a serene path, sheltered and shaded from any hint of a storm. With 2023’s Mercy, he stared straight into the glare of his remarkable past, addressing his noc­turnal New York rambles with David Bowie (Night Crawling), his relation­ship with Nico (Moonstruck, or the passage on Story Of Blood where he said Weyes Blood became a “dead ringer” for his “moonstruck junkie lady”), and a raft of less clearly defined phantoms. The results were implacably chilly, tethered to the present by his choice of younger collaborators — Natalie Mering, Animal Collective, Fat White Family—yet still hemmed in by ghosts.

Spectres still rise up on POPtical Illusion — Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend rears its ugly head again on Edge Of Reason, Shark-Shark digs out its Sister Ray finery from the back of the wardrobe — but this record is more of a one-man show. Despite this, it somehow manages to sound less alone in the world than its crowded predecessor. “Make it happen for you in the future/It’s a better life than in your past”, Cale sings on Davies And Wales, the spring in its step evidence of his long-standing Brian Wilson fandom.

    If a song called I’m Angry suggests a return of his old hockey-masked mayhem, what actually emerges is a stately ice-melt drip of electric piano and self-analysis, the “shadow of decline” unable to dim the final image of someone “dancing in the light”.

While the nebulous quality of Mercy was very much feature-not-bug, a cloudiness indicating the limits of memory, here Cale seems to have sharpened the edges of his songs, any mist or drift purely down to old-fashioned meander­ing. That’s not to say POPtical Illusion isn’t haunted — “there’s someone whispering in my ear tonight” he sings on opening God Made Me Do It (Don’t Ask Me Again), low, lonely synths and fever-dream backing vocals strongly imply­ing there’s no flesh-and-blood source for the voice he’s hearing. Yet there’s a brighter, crisper reckoning here, a sense of shucking off the visions, throwing open a few windows.

What’s outside isn’t always welcome — “the right-wingers burning their libraries down” on Company Commander’s paranoid tangle of beats, or war-ready soldiers on Edge Of Rea­son — but he still stares it down. Funkball The Brewster has a similar submerged rage. “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” he growls repeatedly over mangled Kid A keyboards, ending in a scream.

As POPtical Illusion proves, however, Cale still has a great deal to say, even if the meaning bends and bows depending on where you stand. He’s still fascinated by the challenges of reconciling himself to the past, to the present, to the turbu­lent people around him. As he sings on Calling You Out: “there’s always time for change, my friend.” Work, wonderfully, is still in progress.