SHIFTY ADVENTURES IN NOOKIE WOOD

Catching up to John Cale in the second decade of the 21st century (for me, after a long separation), we find the now seventy-year old troublemaker sporting pink highlights in his unruly mop of hair, and a hipster's mini-goatee on his graying chin. Too bad the music on his latest-to-date studio album doesn't share the same ageless spirit of rebel nonconformity.

Apparently winning an OBE (I almost wrote "earning an OBE", catching myself just in time) isn't the ideal stimulus to edgy songwriting. The backbeat on these dozen tracks is a little too basic and borderline techno for even my liberal tastes, and the melodies follow the same tired lead, providing an entirely featureless backdrop to a surprisingly underwhelming performance by Cale himself. What's missing is the passion and peril of his best work, that exhilarating sensation of clinging to a runaway freight train always about to jump its emotional rails.

With his voice pitched somewhere between the fading pipes of Bryan Ferry and David Bowie, and too often leaning hard on awkward auto-tuned crutches (in the songs "December Rain", "Mothra", and elsewhere), Cale seems to be merely going through the motions here: a sad state of affairs for the same artist who once penned a song vividly titled "Dirtyass Rock 'n' Roll". Maybe he's only trying to keep pace with current trends in commercial music, collaborating with a producer who calls himself "Danger Mouse", and titling one song in silly texting shorthand ("I Wanna Talk 2 U"). Or maybe it's all part of a belated mid-life crisis. Either way, let's hope he finds a late-life second wind and remembers how to live dangerously again.

Flawless John Cale music!

There are albums that certainly are born under a good sign. This "Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood ", 2012, is one of those privileged efforts. Creative non stop, from start to finish, it shows a very mature, yet simple, songwriting. Simple not simplistic.

No "tour de force" or "spectacular" soloings or shoutings, no, John Cale's own aquired style is far from that kind of horseplay or market-wise strategies. He has never been and has had the guts to stay practically "underground" or un-mainstream to put it simply.

John Cale's music is closer to Rock n Roll troubadours like Bob Dylan or Lou Reed or Ray Davies than Peter Hammill or Peter Gabriel, for starters. He is highly creative, imaginative and a great lyricist, but still faraway of the "super-famous" and quiet cliched Prog music's idiosincracies. That is a fact!

A highly inspired songwriting, full of bright compositions (as opposed to its "dark" Art-cover), song by song, with astounding arrangements, energetic performances, full of subtle surprises, and a quiet playful John Cale at his best!

****4.5 "I guess not a prog-fanatic's dream, but it is still "Gold" for me!" PA stars.