The rise of the
punk
/
new wave
scene finally provided
John Cale
with a context in which he didn't seem that much more eccentric than the other musicians surrounding him, and after reintroducing himself to the new audience with 1979's purposefully aggressive
Sabotage/Live
, recorded on-stage at
CBGB
and filled with bleak rants about global militarization, he released
Honi Soit
, his first studio album in six years.
was considerably more polished and stylistically eclectic than
, but
Cale
had hardly shaken off the intense paranoia and foreboding echoes that dominated the previous album, and if anything the cleaner surfaces of
Mike Thorne
's production and the efficient, no-nonsense support of
's road band of the moment brought the album's psychodrama to a finer point;
rivals
Fear
as the most lividly uncomfortable album in
's catalog, and that's saying something. While there are a few moments of relief -- the languid
"Riverbank,"
and the
pop
melodies of
"Dead or Alive"
and
"Magic & Lies"
-- more typical are the battlefield nightmare
"Wilson Joliet,"
the bemused espionage of
"Strange Times in Casablanca,"
and the paramilitary ranting of
"Russian Roulette."
Probably most telling is
"Magic & Lies,"
which starts out with an upbeat keyboard pattern
Barry Manilow
would envy, and ends in a barrage of crashing drums and swooping bass swells that closes the album like a lid slamming shut on a coffin; here even
's token upbeat numbers wouldn't escape his overpowering sense of dread, and on
there is no corner sunny enough to escape the shadow of World War III. ~ Mark Deming