Alternative rock patriarch John Cale, founding member of the Velvet Underground, commands admiration. Only eighteen months after offering the excellent Mercy, here he is again with an eighteenth solo album in six decades of career – an album which expresses with the same vigor as in its beginnings the curiosity and taste for risk which have marked his career. Aesthetically, he continues the art pop momentum launched by the previous one, but this time designed in a select committee, playing the majority of the instruments without resorting to the host of admirers who had joined him the last time in the studio. Eclectic, POPtical Illusion holds together thanks to the musician’s mature voice, his sometimes scathing, sometimes impressionistic poetry, and the reflections on the state of the world that he shares with us, on titles like Edge of Reason, I’m Angry Or Setting Fires. Electric guitars from Shark-Shark seem to have been rescued from an old Velvets recording session. At 82, Cale proves that inspiration knows no age.
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