Or. Music
2003
HoboSapiens
About This Album
John Cale's reentry into the world of pop music is a contentious and accessible one. This is the Welsh iconoclast at his most elegant, energetic, and innovative. HoboSapiens finds Cale using samples as the base of all his tracks and using musicians to fill in his ideas -- ideas that were firmly established melodically, lyrically, and texturally. There are a couple of dozen players here, including guitarists Joe Gore (Tom Waits, PJ Harvey) and Joel Mark, Eno (and his two daughters Darla and Irial), bassist Jeff Eyrich, a small choir of Italian voices, a choral quartet called A Tonal Choir, drummer Marco Giovino, and samples by a host of electro-wizards. But it's not the collaborations that make the recording remarkable, it's the songs. Cale's sense of whimsy is back with a vengeance here. Check the gloriously loopy hook in "Reading My Mind" (one can hear just how deep Cale's influence on David Byrne went), the acoustic rock and irony in "Things," the skittering kit drum and string loops in "Look Horizon," the ethereal keyboard and sample darkness of "Magritte," the dreamy pop expressionism of "Archimedes," and the silly, angular Euro-funk in "Bicycle," with Eno's daughters giggling away.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,6 and 8)

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