John Cale M:FANS

John Cale had been careening through nearly a decade of chaotic and paranoid rock music when he took an abrupt stylistic shift with 1982's Music for a New Society, a set of stark and minimal melodies performed with a quiet touch that made the occasional bursts of volume all the more violent, accompanying lyrics that dealt with a variety of damaged lives. It was one of Cale's best and most powerful works, and more than 30 years later, Cale has revisited the songs with fresh creative eyes on the album M:FANS. Cale's new interpretations are significantly more aggressive than the originals, and are based largely in electronic textures (the new arrangements of "[I Keep A] Close Watch" and "Thoughtless Kind" could pass for a gloomy variant on contemporary R&B, and "Chinese Envoy" now has a cool, pop-wise sheen), though they trade nearly as strongly in dynamics as the original performances. If the original album played as a set of stories about desperate characters looking for something l