No names!

But: what wouldn't I give if all the rock warriors of the sixties and seventies had done without an older work.

Hardly did Johnny Cash teach the astonished world thirty years ago with his "American Recordings" that you can eradicate the mistakes of the past with one or two clever artistic decisions and the bank accounts then report highs again as if by themselves, like the gas storage tanks did today there's no holding back

Overflowing vale of tears

Only one has held back comparatively pleasantly: the Welshman John Cale, half Velvet Underground veteran, half frustrated serious music composer.

A little music now and then for an art project or a minor film, a little self-plagiarism here and there – and a silence about new songs that has now lasted for more than ten years.

Thanks for that.

When the faithful Domino label announced a new double album in the fall, on which the eighty-year-old Cale would allegedly stir up a dystopian hodgepodge with comparatively green-horned semi-young avant-gardists like Animal Collective or Laurel Halo, my personal polar ice caps melted and I mumbled the album title: "Mercy!" And yes, the meltwater murmurs in the once-cold polar, clap-clap, and the world is a blood- and tear-filled vale of tears,

Marilyn Monroe's legs

"Mercy" has apparently become an album that has obviously matured over the years, on which John Cale turns his innermost being outwards in a very homogeneous sound despite the oversized crowd of guests.

And that doesn't mean so much the sometimes striking content of the texts, but rather this incomparable mixture of arts that can arise when music and words find each other, when both morph into a larger whole.

Cale takes two songs to find a way that works for him and us.

"Mercy", the title song, and "Marilyn Monroe's Legs" still seem a bit disoriented, seem too deliberately contemporary with all the instruments and voices chased through every imaginable electronic gimmick machine.

But when you get to the end of the album and the eighty-year-old climbs out of the window and disappears, you've come to understand that Cale only shows his instruments in the first few minutes like the torturer used to show his pincers and skull splitters.

The distortions, alienations, contortions only serve to expose, musically and psychologically, the themes that still seem to concern John Cale in his old age: guilt that he has shouldered and guilt that those who have

In this, as I said, astonishingly homogeneous song cycle, John Cale addresses forgiveness, asks for it and grants it.

A couple of well-done pop songs like “Story of Blood” with the American indie starlet Weyes Blood or “Everlasting Days” with the Animal Collective almost fall by the wayside.

But the core of each of these twelve songs is Cale's voice, this kind of harmonious chanting that is typical for him and one forgives any folly in terms of content, because one thinks one is listening to a revelation every second.

It is only in the seventh piece that this voice can be heard unadulterated, unalienated;

She is now clearly and truly drifting on the ocean of sound, and two songs later we hum approvingly: Yes, today is “Not the End of the World” too.

But with "Mercy" she has become a little more beautiful again.