John Cale - Eat/Kiss: Music for the Films by Andy Warhol (1997)

Putting aside his legendary stint in the Velvet Underground and his prolific output in the punk era (recently revisited on The Island Years collection), John Cale is in the midst of the most consistently rewarding and inventive period of his career. In 1994, Cale released Last Day On Earth, a strange but fascinating collaboration with Bob Neuwirth, and he followed it up with last year's Walking On Locusts, an uncharacteristically cheerful pop effort. Now, the Welsh maestro is back with what is essentially two original soundtracks, commissioned by the Warhol Museum for revivals of the underground classics Eat and Kiss, and first performed in Pittsburgh in 1994 with former Velvets Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison.

The music is without a doubt more interesting than Warhol's films, which depicted, at great length and with no particular flair, Factory hipsters indulging in the activities indicted in their titles. Recorded live in Lille, France, with the Soldier String Quartet, guitarist B.J. Cole, Tucker, and vocalists Tiy( Giraurd and Jimmy Justice, Cale's moving film scores pay tribute not only to Warhol and Morrison, but to the Velvet's original chanteuse, Christa Paeffgen, better known as Nico.

Cale includes Nico's haunting song "Frozen Warnings" from The Marble Index as the second movement in the music to Kiss. Elsewhere, Cole's pedal steel echoes Morrison's noisier guitar workouts, and Tucker pounds away on the toms in her trademark style. Invoking "The Gift," Cale delivers a somber reading of Swedenborg's "Melanethon" in the middle of the music to Eat. In fact, just about the only Velvetsy touch that isn't expanded on is Cale's chaotic viola playing; sad to say, he stayed behind the keyboards throughout this performance. But given how prolific he has been of late, he's probably preparing another album where he rectifies that right now. --Jim Derogatis