Recorded and released in the cultural seconds before Eno played the keyboard keystone and cult touchstone on U2’s Achtung Baby, he and John Cale combined their full-scale mastery of pop techniques to demonstrate that their kleptomanic tropicalia had a place, albeit in an overlooked grotto no one deigned suitable for a resort location - that, after all, was left to “Kokomo” back in ‘88. Sure, “Been There Done That” could be a hymn folded into the backpages of a Promise Keepers prayer book, but everyone celebrates a midlife crisis differently - how silly would John Cale and Brian Eno look in studded leather jackets (o.k. not so bad) while riding chopped hogs, scrambling toward Little Oley Tavern for a drunken fight in the parking lot on clam night (Wednesday)? They’d get their asses kicked, and worse, would have to show their faces at work the next day - it’s a gravel parking lot, incidentally.

Although this would be a tough album to find at your local independent, the grey matter fabricating the seamy virtual grey markets put this at your fingertips - and as someone who’s repeatedly made the mistake of overlooking late catalogue stuff under the mistaken belief that once an artist produces those iconic releases it’s all over, it’s an album like Wrong Way Up that will change your mind (not to mention any number of those late albums by Wire that you don’t have already - who cares if it’s not Pink Flag?).

What Wrong Way Up lacks in absurdist poetic gestures cast in lysergic dysentery it recovers in its similarities to Eno’s work with Roxy Music carrying over into his earliest solo records. And for Cale, it’s a fine opportunity to flex all the musical muscles he talked about on the post-VU playground, whiling it as producer before a brief tenure as a stylistic lunatic, who like Reed faded like so many pairs of tight black jeans. One could probably argue that this record favors Eno’s contributions; it’s his oeuvre and Cale’s just playing in it. Without knowing the backstory, one can imagine the passive aggression that moulded the record, Eno manipulating Cale to draw out his strengths; but as much as one might long for that fiction it appears to be a collaborative exercise, both men sharing in the successes and failures.

The arrangements on “Lay My Love,” “One Word,” and “Empty Frame” are out of step with the popular synth driven and overdriven music of the time - it’s certainly not a Jimmy Buffett record, nor a Tom Petty album, but it doesn’t tap into shoegaze either. Cale’s songs, particularly “Cordoba” access those privileged recesses in the same way Hemingway wrote about the exotic as if it were utterly mundane - something tenured professors refer to as “thought experiments” while everyone else works for a living, and have so little time for counterfactual considerations, sufficient and determining factors, and the causal quirks that lead to snap judgements: reactionary stuff. But as Cale sings “You walk toward the station/I walk toward the bus” the setting vanishes - and it’s a song of regret - or for those without a conscience - what’s known to marketing departments as buyer’s remorse, something easily salved with gift receipts or brandname pharmaceuticals.

But if the universe is expanding outward endlessly, and that image represents any concept of infinity, which is just another way of describing the glass table, chess board, and hookah smoking puppet in Benjamin’s best known aphorism, then it’s left to the imagination to consider the creative finitude this record embodies - “Spinning Away” entrancing the middle-aged David Byrne fans who once loved those Talking Heads records but haven’t listened to them in years - who got sucked into the narrative edge of The Big Chill and took it as a bromide on their collective guilt - this isn’t a record for those among us who scarcely two years later would be neverminding our way through high school - and the screw turns again, and Plush is the new classic rock and The Crow is still the first “R” rated movie you ever saw, no matter how much a record like this would make you think otherwise.