OLD FAMILIARS RETURN TO FORM

2005 was notable for the release of music by some artists who have either been missing in action or who haven't done much to merit my attention in recent years...

Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is surprisingly listenable all the way through! I'm someone who tends to cringe when recalling how Sir Paul went from the most musically gifted and various Beatle to that unrepentant purveyor of insipid ditties best avoided. A friend steeped in the mythos of McCartney patiently points out how almost every McC album offers something worth the listener's time. I've never been convinced and have avoided his records because worse than burning out or fading away is the spectacle of turning into a self-parody. But this album, I found, suddenly, out of nowhere, made me reflect on what it was that made The Beatles' ringleader so distinctive: his labile voice, his insouciant confidence with melody, and his ability to shape a lyric that is clever and elegant, though rarely profound. Even that latter failing is overcome in "Riding to Vanity Fair," a song that looks at the pitfalls of friendship that's as good as almost anything he's written. True, there's a song, "Jenny Wren" (lovely in itself) that comes perilously close to being "Blackbird Revisited" and "A Certain Softness" actually rips off Squeeze's "There's No Tomorrow" (which is a rip-off of McCartney to begin with!). What goes around, comes around, I guess, but it's nice to know that even if SirP loses his shirt in his divorce, he's got some skills to fall back on.

John Cale's Black Acetate does something I find very hard to define. The Cale albums I love best (Vintage Violence and Paris 1919) are distinctive in the way that each song sounds like it could be set on a different album, as if each song is a particular self-contained aural world. Acetate doesn't quite amount to that -- it's an album dominated by the kind of processed rhythm tracks Cale has been working with since at least 1996's Walking on Locusts (which was the last album he made with such fine craft in each song) -- but on Acetate each song seems to find Cale twisting the listener's assumptions in some direction they weren't expecting to go. Which means the album is repeatedly unpredictable. No matter how much I listen to it, it never becomes really familiar. I think this may be the highest accomplishment I can imagine in "popular music." And this effect is not achieved by being particularly "arty" in the established way that classically trained and avant-garde raised Cale can be when he wants (and which marred, for me, much of 2004's Hobo Sapiens). Acetate is accessible, music that melds into its mix styles and rhythms that seem somehow borrowed or "found," as if Cale is creating a unique work built upon a repertoire of mannerisms derived from the music of our day. Some favorite tracks: "Perfect" (the "hit"), "OuttaTheBag," "InAFlood" (which comes as close to a Dylanesque delivery as Cale ever has), "TurnTheLightsOn," "Satisfied": "You'll be wondering at it/I'll be standing by/You'll be smiling at it/I'll be wondering why/Will it stand the test of time/It will stand the test of time." Indeed. Cheers!