John Cale & Actress - Marilyn Monroe's Legs (Beauty Elsewhere)

  • An experimental music titan teams up with Actress for a highlight from an otherwise uneven LP of electronic music collaborations.
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  • John Cale's Mercy is a long, sunless album shot through with creeping paranoia. This could also describe many of Actress’s releases, so it’s smart of the 80-year-old art-rock legend to reach out to work together on the LP's second track, "Marilyn Monroe’s Legs (Beauty Elsewhere)." Actress is in wine-dark Dummy Corporation mode here, clouding the mix with velvety chords as Cale's voice hides in the back, gravely mumbling mathematical formulas and cryptic asides. The lyrics are too vague to make clear whether the invocation of Monroe's disembodied legs is meant to be alluring or creepy, but Actress's deliberately flimsy snare certainly sounds like something inhuman and unwholesome walking towards the listener out of the darkness.
RA