John Cale
had the strongest avant-garde credentials of anyone in
the Velvet Underground
, but he was also the
Velvet
whose solo career was the least strongly defined by his work with the band, and his first solo album,
Vintage Violence
, certainly bears this out. While the banshee howls of
Cale
's viola and the percussive stab of his keyboard parts were his signature sounds on
The Velvet Underground and Nico
and
White Light/White Heat
,
's first solo album, 1970's
, was a startlingly user-friendly piece of mature, intelligent pop whose great failing may have been being a shade too sophisticated for radio.
's work with
the Velvets
was purposefully rough and aurally challenging, but
is buffed to a smooth, satin finish, with
and his group sounding witty on tunes like
"Adelaide"
"Cleo,"
pensive on
"Amsterdam,"
and lushly orchestrated on
"Big White Cloud."
(
also gets a lot of production value out of his backing group, credited as "Penguin" but actually members of
Garland Jeffreys
' band,
Grinder's Switch
.) And anyone expecting the fevered psychosis that
let loose on later albums like
Fear
Sabotage/Live
is in for a surprise;
has rarely sounded this well-adjusted on record, though his lyrical voice is usually a bit too cryptic to stand up to a literal interpretation of his words. If
wanted to clear out a separate and distinct path for his solo career, he certainly did that with
, though it turned out to be only one of many roads he would follow in the future. [The 2001 CD reissue adds two bonus tracks: a previously unreleased alternate version of
"Fairweather Friend,"
and the previously unreleased
"Wall."
] ~ Mark Deming