Charli xcx: House ft John Cale review – haunt me then! An elegantly brutal taste of Wuthering Heights OST | Charli xcx

WWhen Charli xcx says her first new material in over a year is “something completely new, completely antithetical” to the sound she pursued on Brat that defined the era, she’s not kidding. Taken from the soundtrack to director Emerald Fennell’s upcoming version of the novel Wuthering Heights, the dark, gothic house bears almost no relation in sound or mood to Brat’s contents: she says it was inspired by John Cale’s description of the sound of his old crowd the Velvet Underground as “elegant and brutal.”

Always skilled and generous with collaborations, here Charli xcx cedes two-thirds of the track’s vocals to Cale. He delivers a monologue — oblique and conversational at first, then turning increasingly ominous — in a voice that is rich, resonant, and, to a certain type of music fan at least, instantly recognizable. Having transcended time at 83, the same voice that narrated Lou Reed’s harrowing short story “The Gift of White Light/White Heat” 57 years ago can still be heard.

Furthermore, something of Cale’s musical soul seems to influence the entire track: it’s not clear if he’s actually playing the song, but regardless of who’s behind the music, its droning strings, slivers of jagged, feedback-like noise and the massive amount of distortion that mars the final minute all seem to harken back to his time with the Velvet Underground. So, less directly, consider the agonized scream that xcx lets out at the song’s conclusion: Cale was always the Velvet Underground member most interested in disrupting their music with annoying noises, unleashing a series of demonic hisses during The Black Angel’s Death Song and dragging a chair across the studio floor before shoving it into a pile of metal sheets a minute after European Son. And the Velvet Underground aren’t the only inspiration here – when the track kicks in late on, you’ll feel the influence of Nine Inch Nails.

It remains to be seen how this fits into Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights, although you could, at once, connect the words of Kyle’s monologue to the dual fates of Catherine and Heathcliff. By turns creepy and cathartic, it might just as easily have come from another of xcx’s upcoming film roles, director Daniel Goldhaber’s film based on Mundo’s infamous 1978 horror film Faces of Death.

In fact, given how horror movie music jumps up the charts around Halloween, it may have missed a trade trick by not releasing House a few weeks earlier. But maybe that was too gimmicky, and to be fair, House doesn’t need a gimmick for it to work. It’s a powerful, stunning, and rewarding game: a sharp left turn into fertile new territory.