John Cale - Words For The Dying (LP) - Clear Vinyl

John Cale’s Words for the Dying arrived in 1989 like a fiercely lyrical detour, a composer’s protest rendered in strings and breath. Born of the Falklands War and filtered through Dylan Thomas, it is a late 80s outlier that still feels stubbornly alive. The headline detail is irresistible. Cale and producer Brian Eno took the sessions to Moscow, working with a Soviet state orchestra in the glasnost era. You can hear the room, the air around the microphones, the weight of a big ensemble moving as one. It is a record about language, but also about space.

The core of the album is The Falklands Suite, Cale’s setting of Thomas poems for voice, choir, and orchestra. Cale’s baritone does not prettify these texts. It carries them. In There Was a Saviour you hear the clipped consonants and Welsh steel that have always been part of his singing, held in a halo of strings that Eno captures with unusual patience. On Receiving News of the War swells and ebbs like a storm front; the choir answers him in blocks of color rather than polite harmonies. When Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night finally arrives, it is less a showpiece than a reckoning, a singer pushing against time while the orchestra leans forward with him.

Eno’s production is key, and not for fussed-over effects. He works more like a staging director, letting the Soviet orchestra and choir occupy real acoustic depth. The microphones sit back, so you sense the performance as a living body, not a collage. Small details stick. A soft rustle before an entry. The brass edging into glare before retreating. Strings that bloom without syrup. Cale’s viola instincts, long a part of his arranging brain, keep the middle register dense and interesting, so the music never collapses into high treble gloss or low-end mud.

Then the album turns intimate. Songs Without Words and The Soul of Carmen Miranda, two solo piano pieces, feel like private coda notes left on the studio piano after the choir went home. No coy romance, just modal shapes and a touch that favors clarity over pedal haze. They are reminders that Cale, often framed as a provocateur, can also be a clear-eyed miniaturist.

Context matters here. Cale had already done chamber violence and stark confession by the time he reached Words for the Dying, but this is a different wager. He borrows the moral weather of Thomas to look at a contemporary conflict, asking the orchestra to speak plainly. Rob Nilsson’s documentary of the same name follows the sessions and shows some of the tension between Cale and Eno, and also the odd beauty of these performances taking shape in late Soviet studios. It is not a big-budget spectacle. It is craft, hospitality, and stubbornness.

How does it play now, three decades on? Surprisingly immediate. The lines Thomas wrote have only gained charge, and Cale’s refusal to varnish them keeps the set from feeling like a museum piece. There is grandeur here, but also grit. It sits well beside other John Cale vinyl that prizes atmosphere without sacrificing intent, the kind of record you want to spin front to back with the lights down. If you see Words for the Dying vinyl in a bin, especially a clean early pressing, do not overthink it. The noise floor on a good copy lets the orchestral bloom breathe, and Cale’s voice sits right where it should, present but never oversized.

For collectors, this is an odd cornerstone, a link between the raw nerves of his early 80s work and the collaborative brightness of his 90s rebound. It also complements the later live readings on Fragments of a Rainy Season, where he revisits some Thomas material with only a piano and that uncompromising voice. If you mostly know him through the Velvet Underground or through the pop swerve of Wrong Way Up, this album expands the picture. It shows the composer who learned to love friction and then learned how to orchestrate it.

You could buy John Cale records online and call it a day, but hunting for John Cale albums on vinyl has its perks. Sleeve notes, weight, the quiet satisfaction of dropping the needle before the first swell of strings. I once found a copy at a Melbourne record store and had that little thrill of knowing the rest of the afternoon was sorted. For anyone browsing vinyl records Australia wide or elsewhere, this one rewards patience and a good system. It is not background music. It is a room you walk into and let speak.