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,
Cale's first solo album, 1970's
Vintage Violence, was a startlingly user-friendly piece of mature, intelligent pop whose great failing may have been being a shade too sophisticated for radio.
Cale's work with
the Velvets was purposefully rough and aurally challenging, but
Vintage Violence is buffed to a smooth, satin finish, with
Cale and his group sounding witty on tunes like "Adelaide" and "Cleo," pensive on "Amsterdam," and lushly orchestrated on "Big White Cloud." (
Cale 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
Cale let loose on later albums like
Fear and Sabotage/Live is in for a surprise;
Cale 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
Cale wanted to clear out a separate and distinct path for his solo career, he certainly did that with
Vintage Violence, 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