John Cale- Words For The Dying

Label: All Saints

Reissued 8/18/2023, Originally released 1989

First time vinyl repress of a John Cale album originally released on the Opal label in 1989, produced by Brian Eno. “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.” Kiran Sande

Track listing:

The Falklands Suite

1. Introduction
2. There Was A Saviour / Interlude I
3. On A Wedding Anniversary
4. Interlude II
5. Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed
6. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Songs Without Words

1. Songs Without Words I
2. Songs Without Words II

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1. The Soul Of Carmen Miranda