{"id":371545,"date":"2025-11-11T12:46:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T12:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/371545\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T12:46:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T12:46:11","slug":"charli-xcx-house-ft-john-cale-review-haunt-me-then-an-elegant-brutal-taste-of-the-wuthering-heights-ost-charli-xcx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/371545\/","title":{"rendered":"Charli xcx: House ft John Cale review \u2013 haunt me, then! An elegant, brutal taste of the Wuthering Heights OST | Charli xcx"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Charli xcx says her first new material in more than a year is \u201csomething entirely new, entirely opposite\u201d to the sound she pursued on the era-defining Brat<\/a>, she isn\u2019t joking. Taken from the soundtrack to director Emerald Fennell\u2019s forthcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights<\/a>, the darkly gothic House bears almost no relation in sound or mood to the contents of Brat: it was, she says, inspired by John Cale\u2019s description of the sound of his old mob the Velvet Underground as \u201celegant and brutal\u201d.<\/p>\n

Always skilled and generous at collaboration<\/a>, here Charli xcx cedes two-thirds of the track\u2019s vocal to Cale. He delivers a monologue \u2013 oblique and initially conversational, it turns increasingly ominous \u2013 in a voice that\u2019s rich, sonorous and, to a certain kind of music fan at least, immediate recognisable. Weathered by time at age 83, it\u2019s still audibly the same voice that recounted Lou Reed\u2019s grisly short story The Gift on White Light\/White Heat 57 years ago.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Charli xcx: House ft John Cale \u2013 video<\/p>\n

Moreover, something of Cale\u2019s musical spirit seems to infect the whole track: it isn\u2019t clear whether he actually plays on the song, but regardless of who\u2019s behind the music, its droning strings, shards of jagged feedback-like noise and the sheer quantity of distortion that cakes its final minute all seem to call back to his time with the Velvet Underground. So, in a less direct way, do the agonised howls that xcx unleashes at the song\u2019s conclusion: Cale was always the Velvet Underground member most interested in disrupting their music with unsettling noise, unleashing a series of demonic hisses during The Black Angel\u2019s Death Song and dragging a chair across the studio floor before pushing it into a pile of metal plates a minute into European Son. And the Velvet Underground aren\u2019t the only inspiration here \u2013 when the track\u2019s beat belatedly kicks in, you sense the influence of Nine Inch Nails.<\/p>\n

How it fits into Fennell\u2019s take on Wuthering Heights<\/a> remains to be seen, although you could, at a push, link the lyrics of Cale\u2019s monologue to the twin fates of Catherine and Heathcliff. Alternately creepy and cathartic, it might just as easily have come from another of xcx\u2019s forthcoming cinematic roles, director Daniel Goldhaber\u2019s movie based on the notorious 1978 mondo horror Faces of Death.<\/p>\n

Indeed, given how music of a horror film bent leaps up the charts around Halloween, she might have missed a commercial trick not releasing House a couple of weeks ago. But perhaps that would have been too gimmicky, and in fairness, House doesn\u2019t need a gimmick to work. It\u2019s powerful, striking and rewarding: a sharp left-turn into fertile new territory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Charli xcx says her first new material in more than a year is \u201csomething entirely new, entirely…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":371546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-371545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115531139383936970","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}