Energy Fools the Magician Tuesday, June 14, 2005

A biggie. This week's new-release trawl brings the first new vocal album by Brian Eno in almost thirty years (not counting his collaboration with John Cale in the early 1990s). Eno's four previous pop records are something like The Prisoner TV show: seemingly without antecdent, and no heirs to speak of. Sure, you can see where the records came from: There's a heavy glammy influence, and Eno's session players all bring their rich histories to the studio. But for the most part the records have a day-after-tomorrow quality that hasn't dimmed over the decades. Release them tomorrow, and they'd be five steps ahead of almost anybody on the charts.

So how's it sound? Subdued. Another Day on Earth sounds like a compilation of all the atmospheric vocal pieces Eno put together for U2 on the Passengers collaboration; you can also hear echoes of the milder moments on Daniel Lanois's solo records. In short, lots of synthesizer swells, lots of computer-modulated vox, very lento and largo. The lyrics tend toward the personal-apocalyptic: The theme seems to be I am living in strange times in a multi-culti world that I can't control.

I like it. I had ridiculous expectations for this one; I love the frantic precision of the original records, with the unmatched nonsense of Eno's lyrics and Fripp's career-high solos, which sound like he's trying to recreate the Battle of Britain. Another Day on Earth is not that kind of record. Even the title is subdued. It doesn't sing, as a copy chief used to tell me when I wrote crummy headlines.

That said, Eno knows atmospherics like nobody on Earth, and he has made a solid ambient vocal record. I need to give it a few more spins before I say anything more definite. But for now, I'd say: It's worth a gamble.

@ 7:12:00 AM,

1 Comments:

At 7:35 PM, Blogger BeK said...

=Sigh!= Now I'm going to have to get it.

 

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