"Classic Cale: "Hanky Panky Nohow"'s chapel repression recalls [Cale's] roots, and a sense of restless exile pervades "Half Past France", but this also chronicles a time and place in LA, with Cale busy fucking up as Reprise's "corporate freak" A&R, snorting coke under endless blue skies. Little Feat were his band, cutting loose on helter-skelter rocker "Macbeth", and the UCLA Symphony Orchestra added chopping strings and lugubrious brass to the title track's panorama of a feverish, ruined Europe. Melodic sweetness is soured by a decadent sense of something precious being lost common to key early-'70s works, ending in the devaststion of "Antarctica"".