Black Acetate

The sixty-plus former Velvet Underground lynchpin and producer extraordinaire has long enjoyed legendary status, his prolific solo output ensuring continued interest and sold-out live shows everywhere. Age hasn’t slowed him down however, and the follow-up to 2003’s well-received Hobosapiens is a harder-edged, more contemporary rock affair with little of Cale’s more accessible tender side on display. In fact it doesn’t get any harder (or louder) than on the current single ‘Turn The Lights On’ – a full-on guitar assault with Cale’s impressive mellifluous Welsh thunder of a voice almost fighting to keep up with the layers of sound. The similarly riff-laden ‘Sold-Motel’ sounds almost like a Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie workout, while the aggressive fuzztone textures of ‘Woman’ underpin a repetitive hypnotic chorus.
It’s not all bluster however, and the frenetic pace cools down a tad on the acoustic mid-tempo of ‘Wasteland’ and elegiac other-worldly ballad ‘Satisfied’, while the slow-burning, atmospheric ‘In A Flood’ is the most conventionally structured song on the album. Cale’s avant-garde, experimental side has always been hard to keep down, and comes to the fore on the bizarre blend of electronica, disembodied voices and acoustic guitars that is ‘Mailman (The Lying Song)’, while the cut-and-paste approach on the spoken-word ‘Brotherman’ demonstrates, if nothing else, Cale’s continued willingness to stretch the sonic boundaries.