AR: The Academy in Peril

John Cale - The Academy in Peril (1972)

JC, if you don't know and lack the critical faculties to utilize Google, is a classically trained avant garde composer and former bassist for The Velvet Underground. This a post VU solo effort and largely a reference to said classical training*; as such, it's mostly instrumental, quasi-modernist classical compositions with one rather jarring Eno-esque trip into the realm of pop smack in the middle of the record ("Days of Steam"). The instrumentation is fairly varied, with solo piano, trumpet, strings, acoustic guitar, drums and bass, and found sound / spoken word all dotting the record, reaching the maxima of London Symphony in moments and the minima of minimalist solo piano in others. The weird-just-to-be-weird perhaps unsurprisingly rears its head, too, with static television producer instructions running alongside a string quartet on "Legs Larry at Television Center" and whispered, menacing taunts thrust at Henry VIII on "King Harry." Um ... yeah. All said, this is more-or-less a music-as-museum-exhibit work, not meant to sit behind the clinking of cocktail glasses nor to be so much enjoyed as appreciated.

* - It's a great title, but such melodrama probably deserved more in the way of an exhibit of exactly what is threatening the academy. I fully confess that I'm not well-steeped in this domain, so maybe I'm brutally missing something, but I just don't think this album bridges the classical-pop-modernist-experimental gap enough to warrant a title that references the alleged conflict.

I did my usual trick and listened to this one on repeat until it sunk in, ... alas, it's fairly intractable. I almost automatically tune it out the second I stop listening closely (aside from the above-mentioned weird moments and the pop melody), so I'm hard-pressed to recommend it along anything like the usual continuum. Headphones and an anti-MTV-generation level of focus are musts. With that rather colossal caveat, this is good stuff - the tracks notably lack the dissonance of many a mod-clas tune, and even those weird moments aren't particularly grating. It's just a bit difficult to follow the logic - the pop tune is by FAR the thing that stands out most - and while that betrays by naivete more than anything else, it still stands there as an indictment. So while I recommend this as an odd excursion, I don't really recommend it for everyday consumption - I prefer genre-blending forays to full-on leaps into the avant garde, and this one makes me jump a bit too far. Still, worth checking out.

Status: Recommended (solid) ... sort of

Nyet's Fave: "Days of Steam" (lame, I know)