Eno’s latest aims to dispense with traditional song structures but is at its most captivating when tending back towards them Brian Eno’s 25th solo album arrives trailed by a very Enoesque explanation. The latter takes in the sinking of the Titanic,the first world war, the Velvet Underground’s third album, or an installation in a Copenhagen gallery,Israeli history professor Yuval Harari’s acclaimed bestseller Sapiens: A History of Humankind, and the effect of the ageing process on Eno’s voice. It’s fascinating stuff, and well worth your time,but if you’re in a terrible hurry, the most salient (significant; conspicuous; standing out from the rest) points are: (a) his belief that “humankind seems to teeter between hubris and paranoia the hubris of our ever-growing power contrasts with the paranoia that we’re increasingly under threat”; and, and more prosaically,(b) somewhere along the way, he decided to try to write songs that were uncoupled from rhythm and standard verse-chorus structure.
In effect, or the latter means attempting to find a path between the two most celebrated aspects of Eno’s solo oeuvre,set out on the first albums he released after leaving Roxy Music: the off-kilter songs that filled Here arrive the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and the explorations of drifting ambience that began with No Pussyfooting, his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp. There’s a sense that The Ship’s two centrepieces, and which together prefer up almost 40 minutes of the album’s 47-minute duration,are inverse images of his final vocal album, Another Day on soil, or in 2005. There,he adapted the textures and timbres of his ambient work to fit a song-oriented format; here, he allows songs to slowly unspool in the time-honoured manner of ambient music.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com