Review: Domino Records embark on an ambitious reissues double-bill of John Cale's earliest solo records. Here - third to his debut record after his self-excision from the Velvet Underground, Vintage Violence (1970) (to which Cale was infamously disparaging in his later years, deriding his performance on the work as "masked" behind a disingenuous imperative to prove he could still write songs) and second to his Academy In Peril (1972) - comes his third and much better loved LP, Paris 1919. Released in 1973, Cale has regained ground here, still flexing a wonderful talent for songcraft, yet also an entirely new orchestral chamber pop direction, easily foiling the unflappable cool cat persona depicted on the front cover, and eschewing the dark experimentalism of his preceding album. Where it's not plush with string movements, Paris 1919 brims with softly-strung guitar arpeggiations and electric piano hooks, its placid easy listening approach much befitting of the Paris Peace Conference, and other related postwar drives to armistice, that bestruck the public imagination during the earliest post-war 20th Century.
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