The dome-headed one is back (and on Warp too) with his first album in five years, and approaching this record one wonders which kind of Brian Eno album this will be. There are three basic sorts of Brian Eno album. There are the quirky, pop “vocal” albums such as Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and Before And After Science. They are usually good fun. Then there are the lovely ambient records for which he his perhaps most renowned; like Music For Airports, Apollo and Discreet Music. These are genuinely quite beautiful too. Finally there are The Experimental Ones which, if we’re not being coy, often sound like a computer going “BONG!” for an hour; step forward Thursday Afternoon and Neroli. Those ones won’t tick many boxes if you foolishly come to a Brian Eno album expecting toe-tapping, finger-snapping pop classics, and while they guarantee there will never be a “Brian Eno tribute episode” of Glee, they certainly have their charms. It turns out this newie, a collaboration with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, is a mixture of two out of those three basic types (i.e. sometimes prettily ambient, sometimes experimental, and vocal-free).
The first three tracks – most notably Emerald In Lime, which is a gently tinkling piano piece with bits of harmonica on the top – are very much in the Apollo “mould” and create a false sense of expectation that this is going to be one of THOSE records; lush, tranquil, meandering and meditative. Track four, Flint March, takes those expectations, headbutts them, duffs them up and runs off with their coat. This is the point where it all gets a bit obtuse, jarring and well, Warp-y. It starts to sound like the soundtrack to a scary sequence in a horror film. Possibly a horror film in which Eno wakes up in the middle of the night screaming because he realises he’s made some terrible records with James. One track, 2 Forms Of Anger, pulls on some leather breeks and rocks out – but does so in a NEU! sort of way rather than a Bono sort of way. The middle part of the album is given over this sort of experimental stuff, and it’s all okay – nothing to get particularly excited about and nothing to challenge fans of the Warp, or Eno, back-catalogues. Towards the album’s end we’re back in ambient territory, and these are the pieces which work best. The songs here tend to be either pretty or ugly. I know which ones I prefer.
Words: Ciaran Gaynor
See also: Neu! – NEU! ’75 [Astralwerks], Susumu Yokota – Sakura [Leaf/Skintone], Aphex Twin – Classics [Warp]
