The 1981 Listening Post - Brian Eno and David Byrne - My Life In The Bush of Ghosts

 Brian Eno and David Byrne - My Life In The Bush of Ghosts 

#62

By Lori Alley

February 1981

Brian Eno and David Byrne

My Life In The Bush of Ghosts - 

Genre: Experimental/Avant Rock

Allen’s Rating: 3 out of 5

Lori’s Rating 5+++++

Highlights: 

Help Me Somebody

America Is Waiting

Mountain of Needles

The Jezebel Spirit

Qu’ran

  Mea Culpa 

                       Okay!  All of them are highlights!!  Don’t make me choose!!!!!

Bibs up everyone, I’m gonna slobber all over this (sorry for that image, I think this album is a timeless work of art).  I was a junior in high school when this album came out.  Let’s just say that my friends and I were obsessed enough that we routinely quoted lines from it  - “do you hear voices?”  and Jim Vallette adopted his memorable new persona  “ Jezebel.”  

I learned somewhere along the way that the definition of a classic is that it can stand the test of time.  This album does that and , I would argue, is MORE relevant to the 2020 zeitgeist than it was 40 years ago. It’s almost as if it could predict the future.   If I made a movie “2020, The Year In Review” this would be it’s soundtrack.  And nobody would be the wiser (or want to watch the movie, either).  To me it sounds as fresh as it did all those years ago.  Side note:  For fans of this album I also highly recommend The Catherine Wheel (David Byrne) which is equally addictive and came out in Sept. of that year).  

The cool thing about this album, as weird as it seems at first glance, is that you can dance to it in your garage with a bunch of drunk people.  It is at once trippy, interesting, catchy, earwormy and yet somehow still unfathomable.  That’s a particularly Eno-esque trait, I know, but I think My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is the ultimate example of his ability to do that musically.  Makes you think “hey wait, what IS this?  And yet also want to play it while you do housework.  

Not to get political, because really, enough already, but America Is Waiting.  

https://open.spotify.com/album/0uWpq6h99OaylNLXe2KPTR?si=xfE-7QbkQ7qpbeX_9x3miw

The 1983 Listening Post - Brian Eno - Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks

Brian Eno - Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks

July 1983
Brian Eno
Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks
4.5 out of 5

I don’t even know how to review it. It’s lovely. I think, in many ways it’s as good as than Music for Airports or Music for Films, both of which are remarkable.This is just solid ambience from start to finish. Great to meditate to, sleep to, relax to, read to. A worthy inclusion into the pantheon of Eno’s world.

Listening Post: Talking Heads - David Byrne - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

David Byrne & Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today - 2008

My first exposure to this record was through the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Or Ridiculous things said by ridiculous people in a ridiculous movie). I found the song, "Home" pleasant enough but it reminds me of Beck's "Lost Cause". Both are lovely songs with needless sound effects to distract from the simplicity that they should bathe in. You want very much to like the song, but they are both so over thought that I, at least, find myself angry at them.
Also like Sea Change this is an album of songs. If one was expecting My Life in the Bush of (even more) Ghosts, this is not it. "MY Big Nurse and "One Fine Day" sound like the guitar written compositions they started out as. Something intended for campfire guitar. You expect to see people rocking back and forth under the stars and smiling at each other while canoodling under woven ponchos.
By the third track, "I Feel My Stuff", I find myself totally comfortable with the beat boxes and samples and glicks and chirps. The songs have all been so inviting that the determined weirdness of the piano breaks amidst the shuffling grooves don't bother me as much even as it morphs into a near cacophonic semi-rap. They wash over like soft waves at low tide and the rest is blithely hypnotic.
Marrying Gospel to Experimentalism might seem dicey, but on the title track it comes off as inspiring and saddening. It's a real treat. On previous albums Byrne or Eno or both would just keep on in that direction. Once they grasp on to some motif they tend to not let go. Instead, they turn up the tempo a hair and get us back to the campfire with the horn backed "Life is Long".
Sure, Byrne and Eno can't resist some tribalism as on "Poor Boy", but that's a small price to pay for such an accessible collection.

Everything that Happens....is notable for how Eno and Byrne (Like Radiohead before them) completely embraced the internet and new delivery systems, creating flickr pages and websites that engage the fan, completely eschewing advertising and traditional deliveries. They should be applauded and heralded as leaders. The war for the new music delivery template will be fought on two fronts: Startup bands embracing Facebook and Twitter (Steel Train. fun. Etc) and granddaddies of music who can afford to take these risks. Eno, Byrne, Radiohead, these guys are self-sustaining and can afford to be mavericks and vanguards.
I only wish that people like Bruce Springsteen, who appeal to a broader demographic, would do the same thing. The day of the "label" is over. But music is thriving and as good as it ever was. Not "same". Better.

Grade: A
ASide: Home, Strange Overtones
BlindSide: My Big Nurse, I Feel My Stuff
DownSide: The River

Listening Post: Talking Heads - David Byrne - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

David Byrne & Brian Eno - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - 1981

(This review is based on the original vinyl pressing and not the expanded reissue.)

No overview of Eno or Talking Heads would be complete without taking a look at the work they did together in the midst of the Talking Heads career. In a sense, it represents everything Byrne has been trying to accomplish with the heads but was unable to, being dragged down by the albatross that is human beings with, you know, ideas of their own.
The heavy sampling of the record makes it one of the earliest albums to do so with such abandon, creating soundscapes that would become the bread and butter for the likes of Public Enemy and so many others in a couple years. It goes without saying that Byrne wouldn't have been able to complete his masterpiece without the help of Brian Eno who had been turning ambience and sound sculpting to an art form for the previous 5 years before this record was recorded.
What this means is the record is sort of bereft of actual songs. I just mention that because, if you were a Talking Heads fan and you went into this looking for "Life During Wartime" or even "I Zimbra" you're not going to get it. Tracks like "Mea Culpa" sound like they could have just as easily been produced by a young Jean Michel Jarre, if he wasn't so synthesizer obsessed. These are sound pieces with music. Not quite ambient in that they are supposed to flow into the background like "Music for Airports" but more like they are supposed to provide the backing for a high end fashion district shopping experience.
Not a spa, it's too energized for that, demands too much of your participation as a listener, and not a mall, either. But, maybe a high end shop INSIDE that mall. I'm thinking most of "Regiment" as a song I would like playing the next time I'm in Beverly Hills looking for a sports coat. (Which is never)
My Life is probably one of the most important albums of all time inasmuch as it predicated and predicted the explosion of sampling that would come and married that to african rhythms and other third world sounds. Black music could look at My Life as the template for just about everything that was about to come. For that it deserves high marks. I'm not sure when i would ever listen to this record again unless I was painting. Which is something I would like to do someday....
Ultimately, and I know that I am in the minority on this, I find My Life in the Bush of Ghosts supremely unsatisfying. I always have. I get the importance, but I'm not a fan.

Grade: B-
There's really no one better track than the others but...
Aside: The Jezebel Spirit
BlindSide: Mea Culpa, The Carrier
DownSide: A Secret Life

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Remain in Light

Talking Heads - Remain in Light - 1980

David Byrne sounds like a shaman on "Born Under Punches", the opening super-percussive salvo. Only this time I get the real sense that he has, dare I say it, a sense of humor. "Some of you people just missed it!" is a line that just strikes me as funny.
So, I'm reading about Remain in Light and one thing that makes a LOT of sense while listening is that the band, specifically Weymouth and Frantz, were tired of being Byrne's back up band. Which is what they sound like on all the previous records, to me at least. They decided to start working together to create jams, keying off "I Zimbra". And that's very obvious on Remain in Light. "Crosseyed and Painless" has a driving beat and shuffle that makes it ripe for sampling. Talking Heads seem to be even further embracing the burgeoning african music scene, whether, as Wikipedia says, it's because they saw Hip Hop as the future or this was a natural progression from punk/new wave. Some were following Don Letts into Reggae and others were embracing more tribal rhythms. Remain in Light comes out the same year as Adam and the Ants's Kings of the Wild Frontier. I don't think this is an accident. But, Adam's global success is due to his understanding the importance of structure and the Heads refusal to embrace structure. In fact, they seem hell bent on decon-ing the structure whenever possible.
Gosh, just reading about the egos involved here...Eno wanted to be listed as a 5th member of the band. Byrne instructed the designer to credit it as "by David Byrne, Brian Eno & Talking Heads". The arrogance and control freaksim is astounding. Consider: this is a record that is dependent on the interplay between percussion and bass. Without that foundation there is no record. Period.
The lyrics, while they might offer something of interest, are just as often if not more just another instrument. Almost like Byrne and the singers are...speaking in tongues. And yet, there was an attempt to minimize Frantz and Weymouth...
No wonder they created Tom Tom Club.
But, how is the music? Inspired. Take, for instance, "The Great Curve", a masterwork of rhythms, stilleto guitar work (by Adrian Belew), the harmonies, all of them make for one of the best tracks in the band's catalog.
This is also the record with the first bona fide big hit for the band: "Once in a Lifetime". This is the one with the video of Byrne in the big suit. As strange as that video, the song is a slap in the face to consumerism and blind grasping for stature. The mid-life crisis in song. Feels like it. (I can also hear the roots of some of Eno's work with U2 in here) You might find yourself getting annoyed by the end, the polyrhythms never end and each song begins to blend into each other. "The Listening Wind" is a good example of this. But it reminds me instead of the deeper cuts on the Bowie/Eno records of the 70s or even a progression from Eno's Ambient music toward some hybrid animal of base human/programmed fairlight robot. Lose yourself in it. The album's coda "The Overload" could be seen as a sequel of sorts to Bowie's "Warszaw". It's dense, ominous, sad, plodding and funereal. It's unlike anything I've heard from the before or since but that doesn't make it any less powerful. Just...different.

1980 was a great year for music. Adam's Kings. Bruce's The River. Laurie Anderson's O Superman. The Clash's London Calling. And this.
If you only want to hear one Talking Heads record to get a sense of what the band was doing and why they rank so highly in the history of rock if not New Wave and punk, this is the record.

Grade: A+
ASide: Crosseyed and Painless, Once in a Lifetime
BlindSide: Born Under Punches, The Great Curve, The Overload

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Talking Heads - Fear of Music - Fear of Music

"I Zimbra", a percussion heavy, african-rhythm layered song, opens Remain in Light, and, like the first album, suggests a much more accessible experience for the listener than we've been used to from TH. Oh, it's still more concerned with noise-scapes than being a "song", but it makes you want to tap your feet, at least.
Fear not, experimental music lover, "Mind" follows with production that seems to touch on all the tropes of the era. Spacey synth sounds, minimalist spaces between all the notes, vocal gymnastics instead of...um...singing...Byrne and Eno seem determined to turn Talking Heads into a David Bowie-esque art band. It isn't as though the band is afraid of music, per se. They seem to be allergic to songs. "Paper", the first cut that feels like the album is settling into itself, could have easily fallen off Devo's Are We Not Men? (Another Eno produced record). As it progresses, Fear of Music sounds less like an album of songs you would recommend to a friend than a soundtrack to an intense and paranoid urban warrior living in a post-government takeover world. Which may be the intent. Unless I'm reading into things. But "Cities" plays just like that and the very next song, "Life During Wartime" (my personal favorite Heads song ever) is pretty blatant about that subject matter. Which means that I could be right in my interpretation of intent or I let that song inform the rest of the record for me. Either way...The live version is better, the studio version just...peters out...
From there we're back in paranoia land with "Memories Can't Wait", a pulsating, pummeling onslaught of nervosa led by Mr. Gangly Big Suit himself. As it builds it gets more and more tense and results in being one of the only songs on the album not to fade out, but actually end.
Fear of Music pops up on just about every "Best of" list. Whether its the Best of the 70s or all time. I don't agree. I think critics are falling all over themselves to show that they are smarter than the average Kiss listener. They're not. They're buying into pretension as smarts. They are not the same at all.

Grade: C
ASide: Life During Wartime
BlindSide: Cities
DownSide: Mind

Listening Post: Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food

Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food - 1978

Remember when bands gave a shit what their album covers looked like? Sigh...
The reason for the Talking Heads-rospective is because of Eno. I immersed myself in so much of his work (and come to love his work and his ambient work even more) that it seemed only natural, having looked at the album he produced for Devo and covered U2 in the very first Listening Post, that I should jump in to TH. (Another connection: Jerry Harrison, Guitar and Keys for TH, produced Violent Femmes 3rd album.)
More Songs is an album that I actually never heard. My cousin had it, I think. Some roommate in college had it, too. In 198? NY who DIDN'T own it?
Me.
So, what did Eno do? He's got to deal with Warbling Dave up there and it's not like he can just SHOVE him back in the mix. Instead, what you notice on MSAB&F are the drums and bass. The rhythm section is what this album's about. Byrne's still the bug-eyed demento but the band is more cohesive. They don't just exist to serve him and his words. Eno brings them together and a unit of four.
Just as I start to find all the awkwardness a bit unrewarding, in comes "I'm Not in Love" and I'm reminded that the band is more than just a low-fi groove outfit. Now, it's just as straining as the others but it doesn't seem like it's weird for weirdness sake. There's a real sense of trying to accomplish something here.
But nothing on the record prepares you for "Take Me to the River", the old Al Green song. Listening now, it's obviously a companion piece to "Psycho Killer". Maybe it's sung by a victim of the psycho as he's being dragged to his final resting place in some creek somewhere in the pacific northwest.
Works for me.
The album's closer, "The Big Country" is actually a nice little track. A bit of country confection that, to be honest, I would never have expected from them. Well, it's country, run through the hiccuping taffy machine that is David Byrne.

Sidenote: As I read bios for the band while listening to the music I found a quote where David Byrne refers to himself as "Borderline Asperger's, I guess." So, I'm not that far off.

Grade: B+
ASide: Take Me To The River,
BlindSide: Thank You for Sending Me an Angel, The Good Thing

Listening Post: Roxy Music - Avalon

Roxy Music - Avalon - 1982

Just how influential was Avalon? Besides being the crowning achievement of the New Romantic movement that Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry started, it is also the flashpoint for just about every other band of the era that is associated with the movement. The Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunneymen, Simple Minds, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet even Qarterflash and Romeo Void and Yaz, just to name a few. Most of them were already recording already but there's no doubt they all count Roxy as an influence. And this is Roxy Music's salvo of relevance.
The white soul of the title track calls to mind every single John Hughes movie or John Hughes moment you ever lived. It doesn't matter if it was featured in St. Elmo's Fire, or Breakfast Club or About Last Night or She's Having a Baby or not. THIS is the music that, when played, immediately transports you back to a time. The sounds are clean, the spaces between (The title of the second track!) are as important as notes themselves. Never had Ferry and Eno sounded to similar and so disparate. What Eno was investigating with music deconstruction Ferry was incorporating into listenability and pop. Just to prove he can, Ferry dabbles in instrumentals ("India") which lasts about as long as its supposed to, ala Another Green World, and then gives over to the lamentation of "While My Heart is Still Beating".
And that opener! "More Than This". Why isn't THAT played at every wedding???
And with the last, eulogic, "Tara", Roxy Music was over. New Romantics had just begun to hold sway and they would for a few more years before giving over to...a host of other movements. But can you think of a better way to say goodbye?

If you don't have Avalon in your record collection there's no way you can really say you're a fan of the 80s. Or music.

Grade: A+
ASide: Avalon, More Than This
BlindSide: Take a Chance with Me

Listening Post: Brian Eno - Music For Airports (Updated)

Brian Eno - Music for Airports - 1978

And I'm done.
Music for Airports is exactly what it says it is. Music to help with the monotony and anxiety of flying. It's new age to the very core.
I listened to it twice and by that I mean that I can't recall a bit of it. Which is what it's supposed to be, I guess. But, background muzak doesn't interest me in the least.
Which is what this is.

One more thing. Listening to it today, I think Trent Reznor's Oscar for The Social Network soundtrack should probably be shared with Eno. The first track on this album is the obvious precursor to it.

Hard to grade. Technically fine. But, what a waste of my time....

UPDATE: I've not been able to escape M4A since I wrote this review. As it stands right now, it's been pouring in Los Angeles for the entire day. How did I spend the afternoon? Reading and listening to Music For Airports. The baby is sleeping? What music to help keep him calm? Music for Airports. I'm planning a trip in a couple weeks and I can't wait to listen, in the airport, to Music for Airports.

Grade: C
New Grade: A

Listening Post: Brian Eno - Before and After Science

Listening to "No One Receiving", the opening track on Before and After Science, its easy to hear the bridge to Talking Heads. In fact, it's not surprising that Eno would work with them. This album provides the roadmap between that band and XTC and Genesis and proves that New Wave was really just art rock. Quickly leaping into pop with "Back Water", Eno is keeping you guessing, especially if you might have forgotten the first two records for the ambience that followed. Then a left jab of "Kurt's Rejoinder", a bass heavy, almost proto-jazz fusion piece.
The album is all over the place. The electro-tech of "King's Lead Hat" suggests Devo or, a little later, XEX's Group: Xex (one of my favorite records of all time) and, most definitely The Cars' "Shake It Up". While "Here He Comes" might be the loveliest, poppiest and closely resembling Roxy Music track Eno has ever offered.

B&AS is a hodgepodge. A "best of" of unheard music, if you will. Where every track sounds like it could have been something written for a previous Eno album and yet, forward thinking, with one piece of perfection after another. While it does get a little ambient toward the end, it's only because the album is coming to an end of a long journey and you should be tired after such a trip. And ready for bed.

Before and After Science is another great Eno work. And if you wanted to start listening to him I would say start here.

Grade: A+
ASide: No One Receiving, Kurt's Rejoinder, King's Lead Hat
BlindSide: Back Water (The XTC song Partiridge's been trying to write for 40 years.), Here He Comes, Spider & I

Listening Post: Brian Eno - Discreet Music

Brian Eno - Discreet Music - 1975

I will listen to Discreet Music precisely the opposite of the way it was intended. Eno wanted it to be something that blends into the furniture. Not meant to be focused on. So, I've got my noise canceling headphones out and I'm giving it as much attention as I can muster. Which means I'm reading facebook, Twitter and various RSS fed news pieces while I'm doing so. I'll get back to yhou in about 30 minutes when side one is over.
(Makes me want to pull out my old Jean Michel Jarre records....)

Okay. That was 30 minutes wherein I got to read a lot of stuff. It really is exactly what Eno wanted it to be. This is something you can play at the psychiatrist's office or at the spa. Yeah, Spa. That's what the entire first side is. Spa music. Like the world needs that. So, Eno invented New Age. Go figure.

Time for side two.
Three experimental Dadaist concerto variations on Pachelbel's Canon in D. Needless. I mean, I get the experiment. The deconstruction of a well known and simple piece. But it does nothing for me but hurt my ears. If you read about Eno's accident and lying in a hospital bed for weeks then you'll understand why he made this. But I don't want a technical manual to explain an album to me, thanks.

Side A: B
Side B: D
Grade: C

Review Number 442

Listening Post: Brian Eno - Another Green World

Brian Eno - Another Green World - 1975

From the very outset I think I'm in trouble. Everything I don't like about Talking Heads can be found in the first few minutes of the opening track, "Sky Saw". The tribal rhythms mashing up against wailing, minimalist viola. It doesn't last long but it's pretty ugly while it's around. But once I settle in to the album's sensibilities and it's deliberately Dada-ist intentions I find I can relax. At least I know what I'm listening to. I like this better when it's poppified by Penguin Cafe Orchestra, however. (Go Figure: Just read that Eno was exec producer of that album. Wow)
In an attempt to fall over themselves fellating Brian Eno, Pitchfork had this to say about this album: "No one could mistake Another Green World for anything other than a pop album, but at the same time, it is unrecognizable as such."
Um...what? That's sort of...a contradiction, no? It's fairly certain that 9/10 if Pitchfork loves it, I'm a gonna hate it (exceptions, The Hold Stead and the recent Kanye West).
But I don't hate AGW. I just...well...you really gotta be in the mood for this one. If you've ever heard Gary Numan's Dance then you've heard this, cause Numan owes Eno royalties. Also on "Everything Merges with the Night", it is most obviously the influence for Telekon's "Please Push No More". I would wager Radiohead could ship a few pence off to Brian as well.

-Halfway through the first listen-

Nothing clocks in at over 4 minutes and many of the tracks are much shorter, as if Eno knows that he's asking much of you to sit through these experiments and if they go on too long they will crumble. They are each, however, the precise length they need to be.
I want so to hate Another Green World. Instead, it's my favorite Eno record so far.
Extraordinary

Grade: A+
ASide: In Dark Trees, I'll Come Running
BlindSide: St. Elmo's Fire (much better than the movie), Zawinul/Lava

Listening Post: Roxy Music - Country Life

Roxy Music - Country Life - 1974

There's no way I was going to look back at Brian Eno's solo work without taking a good hard look again at one of the most important New Wave records from his old band, Roxy Music. I've never heard the band WITH Brian Eno just with Bryan Ferry so I have no frame of reference. Country Life is considered one of the seminal works of the second British Invasion, right? (it also has the benefit of the greatest album cover a teenager could hope for in 1974 (there it is, again! 1974. Wow, what an amazing year!)

From the outset with "Thrill of It All" there's no way anyone would mistake this for a Brian Eno led band. In fact, I would say that David Bowie's LATER 80s music owes much to this record. As do a number of new romantics. Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Psychedelic Furs, Culture Club, so many others, this is their template.
For the most part, Country Life is a pretty, well produced, easy pop rock record. It occasionally gets a little treacly like on "out of the Blue" but I think much of that is due to Ferry's unctuous, slippery voice. Only Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet could out lounge him in the era. One gets the feeling that Ferry would be more comfortable in docksiders without socks and Izod shirts. That doesn't mean the music isn't great, it means that just as the teeth begin to bite in a song, he's there to make sure the rip is clean and that when you die, it's from exsanguination not from the pain of the bite.
The second side of Country life is the more experimental, darker, british side, opening with the almost somnabulant "Bitter-Sweet" and following it the sad harpsichord led "Triptych" and devolving into the libertine "Casanova". It's great that you can choose like this, almost two different albums or eps. I prefer side one, but the Resident/Romeo Void part of me loves the second side.

Grade: A
ASide: Thrill of it All, Prairie Rose
BlindSide: All I Want is You, Bitter-Sweet

Listening Post: Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain

Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) - 1974

The reason for doing a Listening Post on Eno was predicated on a conversation with someone who asked what I thought about his first four albums, since I had done that career look at Bowie.
I had never heard most of the stuff. My exposure to Eno was through production with Talking Heads, Bowie, U2 and the album Avalon (and one cursory listen to Here Come The Warm Jets).
So, I'm certainly not going to listen to everything Eno has ever done. But since Allmusic and others say that the first 5 albums are terrific, then i will give em a go.

How many times do you think Peter Gabriel listened to Taking Tiger Mountain before he embarked on his solo career? And Adam Ant? Because Eno sounds so much like Stuart Goddard on The fat lady of Limbourg it's sort of scary.

TTM is like Warm Jets part 2 but run through the spigot of minimalism. It's simpler. More accessible. Less obnoxiously and self-consciously artistic. More poppy and fun to listen to. In a way, though, I feel like it's a lesser work. Like Eno is saying "look, I know how to do this.This is simple. Watch how I make you realize that pop is nothing more than an toss off exercise." Then he left turns with "The Great Pretender" and you remember that he has more ideas in his afternoon crap that you will have in a month of nose to the grindstone thinking. It's this song that lays the ease in understanding Eno's interest in Devo and why Are We Not Men sounds the way it does.

Side Two opens with "Third Uncle" and is the most energized and excited I've heard so far. It's my favorite Eno track at this point and here's what's interesting. It's arranged by the bassist. NOT Eno: Brian Turrington. So, what does this say about my feelings toward the great Eno? Not much, I'm afraid.

That said, Taking Tiger Mountain is every bit as good as its predecessor and the fact that it's more listenable keeps it from falling off the rating. But I could see myself getting tired of this real fast. All of this said, if any of Eno's future work sounds anything like the title track, "Taking Tiger Mountain", I'm sure I won't be disapointed.

Grade: A
ASide: Third Uncle, Taking Tiger Mountain
BlindSide: The fat Lady of Limbourg, Put a Straw Under Baby
DownSide: China My China (a song that I'm sure influenced all the wrong parts of Adam and the Ants' Dirk Wears White Sox)

Listening Post: Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets

Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets - 1974

Does Adam Ant owe his entire career to Brian Eno? What about Russell Mael from Sparks? Bowie? I think they all do, in some regard. Surely, without Eno there could be no Kings of the Wild Frontier. Or Gary Numan's Replicas.
I am the first to say that I am NOT versed in Roxy Music or Eno beyond his work as a producer.
What comes to mind, though, and maybe this is why I've had so much trouble with him, is that he seems to approach music in such a literate and constructed manner that I find it very hard to penetrate. It's beautiful, lush and at times resplendent, sure. But, isn't it kind of soulless? I can't imagine the guy who makes this music ever crying. He strikes me as the kind of person who sees art and tells you what it means. Or hears a joke and says, "that's funny" but doesn't laugh.
That's not too dissimilar from the bands that I mentioned up front. You wouldn't call Sparks, Adam Ant, Gary Numan, as confessional. Even though, in their own weird way, they are. Numan is famous now for coming out as a sufferer of Asperger's Syndrome and I think that's maybe what I feel from Eno. I don't know that he would ever be able to let me in. His soundscapes are remarkable, check out the work he did with Bowie in the 70s and Talking Heads in the 80s, but you wouldn't want to play much of it at your wedding. Well, maybe "Heroes".
Okay, all that contrarianism aside, just what do I think of Here Come The Warm Jets? If you like Pink Floyd and Andy Warhol, with a splash of classic British Invasion and maybe a hint of Velvet Undeground, this is the album for you. I'm probably not going to listen to Warm Jets while driving up the California coast, but that's not what Eno wants me to do anyway. Truth is, I don't think he gives a shit what I do. He's doing stuff on this album that The Beatles only alluded to on White Album.
Butting up such beauty as "On Some Faraway Beach" next to the rhythmic Brit-pop chaos of "Blank Frank" is pure genius. Following it with a screed like "Dead Finks Don't Talk" (I don't think Eno and Bryan Ferry got on all that well toward the end) and then the hauntingly elgiac, "Some of them Are Old", Eno comes up with one of the most original and bold pieces of music from the art rock movement. The title track, which codas the album is a wonderful example of melodic beauty and dischordance and probably is the very raison d'etre Beck exists.

I have no doubt that Eno's brilliant. And Bowie was smart to hook up with him. Eno's an innovator and Bowie is a copycat, but I can say this without a shred of doubt: I think Here Come The Warm Jets is a remarkable achievement and a sonic treat and I never want to hear it again.

Grade: A
ASide: Needle in the Camel's Eye, Some of Them Are Old
BlindSide: Baby's On Fire, Cindy Tells Me
DownSide: Driving Me Backwards