“John Cale is on a formidable hot streak in his 80s. When the Welsh avant-garde legend released Mercy last year, it was his first album in a decade. But he’s already produced another gem with POPtical Illusion, a masterful tribute to his bleak imagination. Six decades into his career, Cale is making music with a renewed sense of urgency—he hit a creative turning point in the pandemic, in a frenzy w”