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Review: 'CALE, JOHN/ RIVE'
'London, Camden, The Roundhouse, 3rd Feb 2016'   


-  Genre: 'Post-Rock'

Our Rating:
This was a chance for John Cale to perform at the Roundhouse once again. This was the venue where he played his first solo show way back in 1971, when it was a far wilder venue than it is today. This show was part of the venue's In The Round series and as such was in a seated format which seeing it wasn't sold out was probably no bad thing. The show is also part of the promotion for John's new reworking of Music For A New Society as M:Fans which came out in January.

First on was new young band Rive who are two good-looking young girls of (I'd guess) 19-21 and a bloke on drums who play modern pop soul without the auto tune. They were OK if you like that sort of thing but in truth they were far too nice for this particular show which has meant they were pretty much forgotten once John really started laying into his back catalogue.

John Cale came on in a long tail coat and a shock of blond hair with his current band of Nick Franglen on bass and gadgets and samples; Dustin Boyer on Guitar and Samples and Deantoni Parks on Drums and computers while John played Keyboards, Chaos Pads, Stomp boxes, Guitar and computers for a Cale set unlike any I've heard in the 32 years that I've been regularly attending his live show.

They opened with Time Stands Still, which was immersive and layered with all sorts of odd noises and was sort of a soundscape with John's vocals almost floating disembodied in the middle somewhere following a different tune to the music.It was an unsettling start that led almost straight into Endless Plain Of Fortune that - like almost everything else to come - had been radically re-worked to such a degree that the actual tune had been eviscerated and replaced by a miasma of samples and noises. John intoned the vocals almost as he would normally, yet any notion of this being easily recognized as a classic Cale tune would be laughable. It was weird and strange.

If You Were Still Around continued in the same vein with the destruction of melody; this time replaced by neo-classical string samples being mauled by harsh drums and squalling guitar as the poignant lyrics seemed to be subsumed by the mania surrounding them. John introduced Hemmingway by saying it's a song that doesn't get played very often before they attacked it with the musical hatchets to make sure that even if you knew the song well you'd struggle to work out what it was even when all four of them were singing.

Changes Made is by nature perfect for this sort of deconstruction and a radical reworking it got, immersed as it was in odd keyboard sounds and the first of the bass stomps that hit somewhere in my stomach. It was enough to make the first crowd members to walk out. Yes this show was so far from a crowd pleaser that many non-hardcore fans and some of the hard core ones too found it hard to take.

I spent most of the first verse of Coral Moon struggling to figure out which classic John was sending into a world of paranoia and musical madness before it revealed itself as one of the highlights of the set while sounding like Henry Cow going techno but not understanding how to add the repetitive beats.

Even more unsettling and somewhat perturbing was the odd as can be creeping horror show of Ghost Story; a song that took me most of its duration to figure out. It is one of my favourite Cale songs but the melody and tune had vanished along with the tempo to be replaced by what sounded like a cross between Tighten up and Walk On the Wild Side. It was more than bewildering enough to make more people depart in disgust. Or just confusion.

We then went to the new album for a re-working of Close Watch that was yet again totally unrecognizable apart from the vocals. This time it was musically obtuse abstractions that seemed to speed up and lay on all sorts of stuff that didn't quite fit as they almost destroyed this most loved of Cale songs.

John then switched to guitar for Perfect that seemed to actually have a few remnants of the original tune and melody left making it a little easier to take. After this brief respite, Cale returned to the Keyboards and gadgets to maul Buffalo Ballet into what by the end of it was more like Buffalo mosh pit. It was harsh, uncompromising and seemingly stripped of all beauty.

They then shocked us by playing Fear Is A Man's Best Friend as close to straight as you can get for a song that John has reworked in loads of ways over the years. It was so nice to hear a song sounding like it should sound; a real relief that what is normally one of his most unsettling songs is in this set the complete opposite.

After that interlude of normality it was back to the weird and wonderful with Back To The End, which seemed to go out of its way to add layers of odd noises and oddity where none was really needed. I was starting to feel a touch bored at all this radical reinvention for the sake of...what exactly?

I Wanna Talk To U as one of the more recent songs sort of fit this madness better than the classics but it still seemed to meander as 150 extra ideas were crammed into its four minutes. Wasteland had all sorts of madness helping to conjure up the end of times distressed world as John stomped on the bass box that just made this gut busting noise very queasy sounding and uneasy.

They then sort of went sludge jazz on a long, etiolated re-imagining of Ship Of Fools that totally ditched the normal tune as Cale returned to play guitar and seemed to mangle it with glee; almost like he has some sort of Musical Alzheimers that allows him to remember all the lyrics and none of the tune and we were all cast adrift with no sails or compasses on this lurching ship.

The set then closed with what seemed a bit of a shock: an almost straight take on Gun with Cale still on guitar and Dustin on bass making it a "normal" band that sounded great as the song morphed into Pablo Picasso. It was so good to hear them playing the actual tune and melody before John thanked us and said goodnight.

He left to decent applause and as loads of people headed straight to the exits the lights went up shortly afterwards. We would not be getting an encore this evening and to be honest I don't think they deserved one either as this was a purposely crowd dis-pleasing set.

You can see this band in action in South America in March before he reworks the Velvet Underground in Paris in April. He says in conclusion, with some trepidation.
  author: simonovitch

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