John Cale - blackAcetate:

Mon 21st Nov, 2005 in Music Reviews

Capitol have gone a long way toward billing this album, the grammatically challenging blackAcetate:, as a new lease of life for John Cale.  Perhaps it is, and perhaps I have just heard too much ‘underground’ shit in my years that the magic of this disc totally eludes me.  As Cale growls on Brotherman (in his worst Tom Waits meets William Burroughs growl) “I write reams of this shit everyday.”  Yes, don’t we all.

Like his old sparring partner, Lou Reed, Cale has nearly always been at his best when collaborating.  Good news, then, this is all but in nature a collaboration.  He seems to need the human drama of co-operation, compromise, admiration and envy to tap into those great moments of his.  Staring into a computer program as has been his want of the last couple of years is an excellent way to retain total creative control, granted.  But it’s also an excellent way to disappear up your own much-kissed arse.  And while HoboSapiens, his previous outing, was far more binary than blackAcetate:, at least it felt like a genuine attempt to express himself.  The ultimate problem with this disc is that Cale does not have the voice to execute it in the way he would like.  Nearly every time the guitar starts to roar he seems to be drowned deep beneath it, with little ability to guide the song in any other direction than a slow painful plod toward the five minute mark.

blackAcetate: – allegedly – is inspired by the new breed of hip-hop production teams (centrally, Dre and Pharrell; both of whom it is interesting to note are well past their creative peaks) and it feels like nothing more than a school project.  A Look What I Did On My Holidays.  He and co-producer Herb Graham Jr (supplier also of the MOR drum/bass groove herein) seem to have missed the point, however, if that was the aim of this disc.  With the exception of Woman, the majority of the album slides by inoffensively and with increasing tedium.  By the time you get deep to the second side, you know it’s just not going to get much better.

If the sub-Zooropa guitar work on ForARide don’t give you anxiety attacks upon the first listen, then the ethical conundrum of Perfect will get you, time and again.  Essentially it is Lou Reed’s Vicious updated with a whiff of stadium rock.  And jesus, listen to the wah on that geetah!  Why has Cale waited for so long to have a bash at it?  Sure it may be the teenage fanboy in me writhing in pain – years spent scouring second-hand bins for those ol’ Velvets bootlegs (The Ostrich, anyone?) – but deep inside it makes me sick to the stomach.  I’ve yet to hear the track all the way through.  Emblematic of my relationship with the whole album, then.

Likewise, Sold-Motel follows with a solid bar-band-boogie over which his once dominant singing (part drunk, part waif) barely distracts you for long enough to realise you may be listening to a Live record.  While one by one my heroes from the ‘60s and ‘70s have revealed themselves to be careerists of a magnificent kind, Cale always seemed brushed with the sort of eccentiricity that wouldn’t allow him to understand the lowest common denominator (even if he wanted to).  Of course, Cale cares fuck all for what I and countless other detractors think of blackAcetate: – it is that spirit of self-belief (absorption, delusion) that enabled Young to record Trans and Reed his Metal Machine Music.  This is neither of those, might I hastily add – it is just another three star album that’ll be filling hock shops the world over.  At least Neil and Lou had the balls to destroy their past in the process (avoiding any criticism in the process?).

No, it’s now official: all my teenage heroes are washed up.  Sad as it may be, it’s liberating to know that I have no one left to disappoint me.