John Cale Words For The Dying LP (Clear Vinyl)

First-time vinyl re-press of a John Cale album originally released on the Opal label in 1989, produced by Brian Eno.

While musically this album doesn't match many of his more innovative works, this record has nothing to do with rock and roll. It's Cale singing the poetry of Dylan Thomas accompanied by a Russian orchestra and choir. Recorded in St Petersburg in 1989 - a pivotal moment in Russian history - it is one of the best pieces of music Cale has ever been involved with and if you're a fan of his that's not a trivial statement.

Words For The Dying has at its heart The Falklands Suite, Cale's baroque if heartfelt response to the Anglo-Argentinian War, which finds him setting the poems of his beloved Dylan Thomas to music. When building songs around another's words, the results often sound forced, but Cale does a magnificent job of compressing Thomas's lyricism into neat melodic phrases, themselves just components of a vast harmonic mega-structure scored for the USSR's Orchestra of Symphonic & Popular Music of Gostelradio. A project that could easily have collapsed under the weight of its own ambition is instead a late masterpiece, thanks to Cale's deep-seated compositional genius, and unobtrusive but resonant production from Brian Eno.