Back catalogue: Rock (All)

Review: Domino Records embark on an ambitious reissues double-bill of John Cale's earliest solo records. Here - third to his debut record after his self-excision from the Velvet Underground, Vintage Violence (1970) (to which Cale was infamously disparaging in his later years, deriding his performance on the work as "masked" behind a disingenuous imperative to prove he could still write songs) and second to his Academy In Peril (1972) - comes his third and much better loved LP, Paris 1919. Released in 1973, Cale has regained ground here, still flexing a wonderful talent for songcraft, yet also an entirely new orchestral chamber pop direction, easily foiling the unflappable cool cat persona depicted on the front cover, and eschewing the dark experimentalism of his preceding album. Where it's not plush with string movements, Paris 1919 brims with softly-strung guitar arpeggiations and electric piano hooks, its placid easy listening approach much befitting of the Paris Peace Conference, and other related postwar drives to armistice, that bestruck the public imagination during the earliest post-war 20th Century.

Review: It's hard to feel 'meh' about John Cale. In fact, it's impossible. The Welsh musician, Velvet Underground alumni and composer has given us 18 studio albums, including June 2024's Poptical Illusion, and there's nary a misstep in the lot. His latest plays out like a warm bath full of dreamy optimism, a follow up to the highly collaborative affair, Mercy, here we see the super-talent adjust his focus and fly out alone to prove the point. And prove it he does. Across 12 weird and unarguably wonderful tracks, Cale manages to defy genres, flitting between chamber punk and beach pop, theatrical croon-dom and syrupy downtempo. While there are dark-er moods, 'Funkball The Brewster', for example, on the whole this is smile-inducing, if bat-shit crazy stuff, from start to finish.

Review: ***B-STOCK: Creasing to corner of outer sleeve but otherwise in excellent condition***


In November 2022, Cat Power took the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. Held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966 - but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabeled bootleg - the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing ire from an audience of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock n' roll. In her own rendition of that historic night, the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall inhabited each song with equal parts conviction and grace and a palpable sense of protectiveness, ultimately transposing the anarchic tension of Dylan’s set with a warm and luminous joy. Now captured on the live album Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, Marshall’s spellbinding performance both lovingly honors her hero’s imprint on history and brings a stunning new vitality to many of his most revered songs.