I’ve seen John Cale perform live twice in my lifetime. The first was back in 1999 when he played five separate and very different sets at an Irish music festival. I approached him for an interview but was politely refused. The second time was later that same year when he was interviewed at the In The City music industry event in Liverpool. I made sure that I sat under his nose with my mini disc recorder ready and primed. I thought, ‘Got ya Johnny boy…‘ Cale has a certain formidable presence and a mind that’s as sharp as a razor. He’s a musical vagabond whose etchings tend to look more forward than backward. When Cale plays, you listen. And that’s precisely what I did with his first studio album in seven years.

In fact I listened to it several times before its quality and musicality sank in. It’s a wonderful album by one of the industry’s true greats, and quite unlike anything I’ve heard before. Zen opens proceedings with a song that beats a steady, threatening instrumental path to the first vocal passage. The heavy beat continues as Cale almost recites the song’s intense, intelligent, polemical lyrics. It’s a strong piece of musical communication, with just the faintest sign of a melody, and an impact that grabs and sustains my attention to the last vanishing drum beat. Reading My Mind is a heady mix of pop and folk with oriental voice samples, thrashing instrumental interludes while rushing along at a fast pace. There’s sirens, heavenly choruses, dead-beat drums and of course Cale’s vocal, in a song that’s lighter and funnier. Things is an enormous, immediate pop song that I reckon could seriously chart, if Cale was so inclined. A monstrous melody and a chorus that would have any crowd singing along - fabulous! A threatening, dark highlight is undoubtedly Archimedes where Cale employs a far-flung falsetto voice to add drama and ambience to a great, glacial-paced song.

The sucker punch comes when Cale reprises the potential charting pop single, Things, and proceeds to turn it into the soundtrack to some gruesome horror movie with his Things X version. The atmospheric, highly emotional and compelling Over Her Head rounds off a wonderful album.

At sixty years of age, Cale fully reveals his inventive musical genius in an album that springs many surprises, and travels the full range of mood and pace. While spiced with the avant-garde, the album ends up as an accessible and fascinating musical journey, with some of the credit going to co-producer Nick Franglen (from the fabulous chill-out duo Lemon Jelly).

HOBO SAPIENS is an album that reveals its secrets slowly but surely. Give it time, and it will win you over - with a vengeance.

4.5/5