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John Cale review – 83 years old and still forging deeper underground
There’s no slowing down for the avant art-rock octogenarian as he forgoes predictability to showcase the staggering breadth and depth of his songcraft
An early outing of Captain Hook, a sprawling avant art-rock deep cut from a 1979 live album, sets the tone for an evening that is less about delivering the obvious and more about showcasing the staggering breadth and depth of his songcraft. Sitting almost permanently behind a keyboard, Cale doesn’t give his masterly viola skills an outing tonight, but he sounds in remarkable voice for a man returning after several cancelled shows and four days on doctor-ordered vocal rest. Under a deep red light, Cale and his band play a tense, moody-bordering-on-menacing take on Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel, although the heavy-handed delivery of The Endless Plain of Fortune fares less well, feeling drained of all its subtlety and tenderness.
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