Album Review: John Cale - Fragments Of A Rainy Season

Best known initially as Lou Reed's main musical foil in The Velvet Underground, John Cale's half-century of creativity is often marked by his iconoclasm - lately even recasting and reinventing his own earlier works.

It's not a new trick to him. In this 1992 effort, Cale distilled a range of compositions — both his own and songs of others — mostly into starkly intimate voice and piano studies. From a quiet crooning recital of fellow countryman Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas In Wales, through the descent into hysteria of Fear (Is A Man's Best Friend), it's almost a piece of performance art as it stands here. From the sepia observations of Western-tinged Buffalo Ballet, and the fragile humanity of the confessional that is (I Keep A) Close Watch, much of it is quite wonderful. The original Fragments... notably also includes Cale's towering reading of a little Leonard Cohen ditty called Hallelujah — it's the version that Jeff Buckley took as a template, and so many have since.

This new expanded edition adds some out-takes, including Cale's take on The Velvets' I'm Waiting For The Man in this style — and the later abandoned thoughts of adding some strings to the original idea — which may have slightly muddied the focus. But really, they're only sidetrack curiosities to a man utterly inhabiting songs in one of the most revealing and vulnerable ways imaginable. It's a stunning piece of work.