Bleep

Among the many turns left of the art rock legacy John Cale is known for, Words For The Dying stands out in his manifold discography. Released in 1989 and produced by his longtime friend and collaborator Brian Eno, it began life seven years earlier during the Falklands War, where Cale found himself at a confluence between Dylan Thomas poems, densely layered classical arrangements, and the agony of the surrounding world. Yet, while reckoning with times of chaos and peril, Words For The Dying does so with flying compositions that don’t often come across as openly dark and foreboding, adding to its charm.

The topics of war and death crept throughout Dylan Thomas’s poems just as they do throughout Words For The Dying. While Cale doesn’t recontextualise the subject matter, he takes these poems far beyond the text with grandiose flourishes of strings and brass recorded in pre-Glasnost Moscow. Depicting valiant refusal of mortality and impending death, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ renders Thomas’s most well known work with a jaunty twist, as Cale and choir twirl around each other with energetic staccato flutes and plucks.

Epic brass arrangements and booming drums open the album as though echoing military fanfare, with ominous strings droning underneath the gargantuan notes. Clockwork plucks pace across the verdant landscape of ‘There Was A Saviour’, its lyrics betraying the beautiful orchestrations with friction and strife ridden imagery. Electric piano chords cut between elegant melodic expressions in ‘Songs Without Words’, expanding into the chirping, fluttering synths of ‘The Soul Of Carmen Miranda’, which goes beyond the earthly realm the rest of the album inhabits.

John Cale flexes his composition skills, poetry repertoire, and dynamic abilities as a performer on this gem in his discography.