Descriptions of the two tracks would almost have to be either incredibly short or incredibly long; it would be hard to find something in between. They could be short, on the one hand, because the overall picture of each of the tracks doesn't evolve much over time. The Heavenly Music Corporation, in almost its entirety, consists of Fripp's atonal guitar warblings, cycling and fading in and out a most unsettling manner, while side two's Swastika Girls is more of the same except with some interaction with Eno's synth loops (as said before). On the other hand, there is actually low-key development of these tracks that becomes more obvious with each listen, and this is why descriptions of the tracks could be incredibly long; I could, if I wanted, spend a solid year digesting this album and come back with a review that pours into every nook and cranny and elaborates on why minute 16 of side one is a great counterpoint to minute 10 (or whatever) ... of course, this would be the most boring review ever written (for the average reader, anyway), so I'll stay away from that, thank you.

So what can be made of this in the interim? Well, for one thing, this isn't exactly ambient, at least not any more than, say, Augmn off of Can's Tago Mago is ambient. Ambient, among other things, is supposed to have a calming influence on the listener, and I would be hard-pressed to call large portions of this album calming. Heck, depending on the definition one uses for what is "music," this could easily fall into the category of albums that cross the line (mentioned in the introduction) of what is and what isn't music; this is, after all, essentially just a sonic show-and-tell. On the other hand, though, it's an extremely interesting listen, and at least on some perverted level I've managed to enjoy it (though on most other levels I really didn't). I'll likely never listen to it again, but I'm glad I've listened to it as many times as I have; it's one of those albums that everybody should hear once in their lives. I give it a seven, then, out of sheer respect for how ballsy it was to release an album like this, one more avantgarde than anything yet done by even remotely mainstream (and yes, back in 1973, these two were at least in the "underground mainstream") artists, and the fact that I kinda sorta liked listening to it. Or something along those lines.

Take the album's opener, Needle in the Camel's Eye, for instance. There are layers on layers of Manzaneras aggressively playing single notes (at least, that's what it sounds like to me), coming together to form chords, which should please both fans of minimalism and of dense arrangements, and what is that chord sequence and vocal melody if not one of the loveliest, warmest Beatles-quality ditties around? It might be nice if Eno's vocals were higher in the mix, but then again that might overshadow the incredibly cool-sounding guitars, so I don't mind. And those start-stops in the second half? Don't they feel completely natural, completely organic, completely necessary to you? I know they do to me.

Lessee, then there's The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch (what a wonderfully awful title), which has wonderfully goofy singing and a wonderfully goofy synth solo, which shows quite amply that a solo full of weird noises can compete with a solo full of weird notes any day of the week. And then, of course, there's the glorious Baby's on Fire, an awesome, loud pop-rocker with a catchy-as-hell vocal melody (with a totally over-the-top singing performance to boot) and what just happens to be my favorite guitar solo ever. From the very first notes, the tone screams out "I AM AWESOME," and Fripp hits on note and sound combinations that make me grit my teeth and tighten my sphincter every time. It's not really a solo with any "purpose" to it other than just trying to rule as much as humanly possible, but that's more than enough for me.

The last two songs of side one aren't quite as walloping, but they're terrific nonetheless. Cindy Tells Me is a pop ballad that has always struck me as Eno going for a classic Beach Boys-ish sort of sound, only with vocals more nasal than Mike Love on his worst day (not that I'm complaining) and a piercing guitar solo that somehow manages to fit in perfectly. And then there's the menacing Driving Me Backwards, centered around two notes on a piano (yup, Brian the minimalist ambient dude was there on some level from the beginning) that create an awful lot of well-placed, but still kinda goofy tension; it's dark, but dark in a way that I feel like it could be the background music of one of the grey, murky castle levels in Super Mario 3 or something like that.

On Some Faraway Beach kicks off side two, and to say it's fantastic is to say nothing. It's filled with one keyboard level after another that's incredibly easy to play and would probably be easy to write, but to put them all together into something like this is simply unbelievable. I'll tell you, one of the synth lines (you'll know it when you hear it) before the vocals come in, in the context of all of the other layers that have come before, ends up being one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous sounds I've ever heard in my life, and by the time we get to the lyrics about wanting to commit suicide on a beach, it's all I can do to keep from crying. And sheesh, way to strip it back down perfectly, Brian.

The noisy and ugly Blank Frank, which comes next, is a bit of a letdown for me, but I still appreciate it somewhat; it's Fripp's second showcase of the album, and some of the rhythm work here is just insane. Not always really enjoyable to my ears, but interesting nonetheless. Dead Finks Don't Talk is better but not great, with both the singing and speaking parts of the song definitely dredging up thoughts of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music (e.g. In Every Home a Heartache or Song For Europe, even though the latter was done after Eno left), but it's the goofy "More fool me, bless my soul" McCartney-esque pastiche in the second half that makes the song for me (not to mention the processed noise fest in the last half minute).

Fortunately, the album ends on a very strong note, with an INCREDIBLE pop ballad in Some of Them are Old and a nice (sorta; there are vocals, they're just very buried in the mix and only in the second half) instrumental keyboard number in the title track. The former is just sooooo warm, with some of the loveliest pedal steel guitar work you'll ever hear in the mid-song break before a bunch of beautiful layered synths come back to carry the main melody with gusto. And the mood, sheesh, the mood; I want to say it's nostalgic, but that doesn't feel quite right. It's unique, whatever it is, and the confusing bell sounds at the end (that come out of nowhere, really) only make it that much more puzzling. And the latter? Can you think of a more beautiful song about getting peed on? I sure can't!

Oh man, what an album. Anybody who wants to lay any claim to the status of "music snob" simply has to have this around. The buying public didn't really know what to do with it, but time has largely corrected that mistake, and you should join the critical masses and swipe this up as soon as possible.

The strongest example of what I mean by saying the album drags comes from the three track stretch of The Fat Lady of Limbourg, Mother Whale Eyeless and The Great Pretender. I consider all three of these to be good songs overall, yes, but that doesn't mean I like any of them in their entirety. The Fat Lady of Limbourg comes the closest to completely satisfying me, as a creepy, quasi-mournful number driven by a memorable repeated "that's what we're paid for" line, but five minutes of it just seems like overkill to me. The relatively upbeat portions of Mother Whale Eyeless are standard high quality Eno, but the upwards bit that he sings in other parts just sounds incredibly awkward to my ears; I can tell he's trying to be hypnotic with it, but I'm just not as impressed with this as I am with the efforts he'd start showing within a year. And as for The Great Pretender, well, I'd more or less be fine with the whole track were it not for the last fifty seconds consisting of a single noise set on endless loop. Too bad, seeing as I like the vocals and atmosphere, even if the melody continues to elude my memory.

In any case, the biggest problem I have with these tracks comes not from their individual characteristics, but from the way that, collectively, they just seemingly slooooow the album to a craaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwl. For whatever reason, these tracks feed off each other in a way that makes them each sound way more sluggish than they do individually; for an artist like Eno, who showed such a knack in his prime for making albums greater than the sum of their tracks, it's disappointing to hear the opposite effect at work.

I'm not an enormous fan of the last two tracks either, though I do think they're both quite good. China my China is a song that I enjoy plenty while it's on, but even after a ton of listens, I still can't remember how it goes once it's done ... on the other hand, it deserves major, MAJOR props for probably being the only song in the world to feature a typewriter solo (!!!). The closing title track, then, is rather pretty and calming, making effective use of what's basically a two-note guitar melody. In other words, it's good; it's just not mindblowingly cathartic, which (justly or not) is the standard I've set for mellow Eno ballads. It would be a near-masterpiece by the standards of most bands, though

The other five tracks are pretty much great, and (as mentioned earlier) largely different from what one would have expected in the wake of Warm Jets. Third Uncle is a fantastic up-tempo paranoid rocker, with Manzanera strumming at a lightning-fast rate (and throwing in some awfully intense yet almost psychadelic overdubs) and Eno delivering his lines in a way that could almost be considered rapping (there's not really any pitch changes, after all). It comes closer than anything else here to the style of Warm Jets, but even then there's a stripped-down aggression that not even Needles in the Camel's Eye (which is much poppier than Third Uncle) or Baby's on Fire could match.

The opening Burning Airlines Give You So Much More is a fabulous opener, with a playful theme that's instantly identifiable as a tweak on traditional Chinese note sequences and with a delightful vocal melody and lyrics about goodness knows what (not in a pretentious way, though). The following Back in Judy's Jungle ostensibly matches with the concept suggested by the album title, with lyrics that in places read like military orders and reports and a part that almost breaks into a war march (though this is simultaneously a waltz, strangely enough), but it too is tweaked through Dadaist rearrangments of lines into something that is completely unpredictable from start to finish.

Finally, on side two, we get a couple of other major highlights. Put a Straw Under Baby is a hilarious lullaby with infamous lines like, "There's a brain in the table, there's a heart in the chair, and they all live in Jesus; it's a family affair" and with great imitations of recorders from Eno's synths. It's also notable because, after Back in Judy's Jungle, it's the first track to resurrect even a feel of China in the music, even if the lyrics have nothing to do with it. And finally, The True Wheel is a high-quality stomping Bowie-esque piano-rocker with big anthemic, "We Are The 801!" chants by a mini children's choir interspersed between Eno's warblings and spiced up by yet some more great minimalistic Manzanera guitar work (I swear, this man is getting dangerously close to cracking my Top 5 Guitarists list). And man, do I ever dig Eno's "We are the ..." vocal lines in what essentially works as an extended coda to the piece.

So in total, this is one heck of an inconsistent album, but the high points are so neat that I can't help but give this a very high grade. Eno would do better things, yes, but it's a significant step forward (after all, as great as Warm Jets was, it still largely tied in with Eno's Roxy Music past) and thus a near necessity for all decent musical historians. Just make sure that you get his other "big" albums first.

Of course, it also doesn't hurt that the four "normal" songs here are absolutely ace, and among the very best that Eno would ever put to tape. The first three each feature Robert Fripp as a guest, and in each case he throws in an amazing solo, but not in a violent Baby's on Fire sort of way; to the contrary, he's rather restrained, but still full of giddy, emotionally-charged energy, and is a major reason these songs are as enjoyable as they are. St. Elmo's Fire combines an upbeat poppy piano/synth onslaught with an absolutely amazing vocal melody and some of the best vocal harmonies imaginable (the way the multiple Enos come together to sing, "In the bluuuuuuue August moooooooon, in the coooooooool August mooooooooooon" is something you have to hear to believe), and when Robert starts playing after Eno sings, "And we saw St. Elmo's Fire splitting ions in the ether," the effect is simply orgasmic. I'll Come Running, which comes three tracks later, is a relatively simple pop song full of rolling piano lines, but who needs complexity when you have such a perfect song about what real love is and with such a majestic guitar solo over such majestic synth chords in the break? Funnily enough, Fripp's instrumental credit in the song actually says, "Restrained Lead Guitar," and it's his combination of restraint and majesty here that makes the whole effect so amazing.

Three tracks later comes the album's longest song (at a whopping 4:01), the mellow, downbeat Golden Hours, featuring Fripp on "Winborne Guitar" and with some bits of viola work from John Cale (who also shows up on the opening Sky Saw). The vocal melody is once again stupendous, the keyboard textures that drive the song forward are amazing and hypnotic as anything, the lyrics are amazing (for some reason, the line, "I can't see the lines I used to think I could read between" strikes me as a particularly inspired line), and Fripp's speedy-yet-delicate solo in the break is something I would never have imagined possible from the man if I only knew his Crimson work (then again, I guess he did play the guitar lines in Epitaph, but by this time that was a musical lifetime ago, and even then this is way more delicate). And finally, the penultimate track, Everything Merges with the Night, features one Brian Turrington on bass guitar and piano, with Eno himself handling the guitars, and the way he makes the guitars every bit as entrancing as his synths are in the rest of the album is truly something to behold. It goes without saying, too, that the vocal melody is of jaw-dropping quality.

So that's the "normal" songs, and I still haven't mentioned the ten other tracks of the album. Sky Saw also has vocals on it, but it can hardly be lumped in with the four tracks already mentioned, as the vocals are a largely superfluous element on top of a chaotic number (with edgy, unsteady drumming from Phil Collins and two separate bass players) that really does remind me of a see-saw (that happens to also be "sawing" back and forth) floating in the sky, going up and down in a perversely hypnotic matter. The viola section is ace too, by the way.

Of the other nine tracks, a small handful are real standouts, whereas the others, while certainly not hurting anything (and in fact being rather essential for "filling out" the album as a whole), tend to fall into a "huh, that's pretty neat" category rather than a "wow, that's awesome" category. Amongst the "lesser" tracks of this album, I'd include Over Fire Island, the title track, Little Fishes and Zawinul/Lava; all of them are either neat or kinda pretty, and they don't go on long enough to get boring (though I'd actually say Zawinul/Lava comes a little close), but they don't make me particularly giddy either. To a lesser extent, I'd also include Sombre Reptiles in the list, even though the music is really evocative of big Komodo Dragons lying around on rocks (at least, it is in my mind); it's neat, but it doesn't stir much inside me.

The other tracks, however, stir plenty. In Dark Trees reminds me of getting lost and trapped in a dense jungle, with only bits of sunlight peering through the dense canopy of trees above, and with a sense that danger is all around me and could strike at any time. Becalmed is just pure, unadulterated gorgeousness, mixing a somewhat mournful piano line with synths that do their very best to try and bring a ray of happiness to the proceedings. And the closing Spirits Drifting, well, that just reminds of that part at the end of the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence in Fantasia with all of the spirits returning to their graves as night draws to a close.

None of this, however, measures up to the sheer minimalist brilliance that is The Big Ship. It kinda follows the On Some Faraway Beach of layering one line after another until the result is pure catharsis, but this takes an even more minimalistic approach (except for the percussion loop Eno sticks underneath), as it uses "stiller" synth sequences (and no vocals) to make its point. It's hard to describe on paper what exactly it is that makes this track stick out so much, but a couple of listens ought to do the trick; it's simultaneously majestic, depressing, optimistic and crushingly powerful. It's amazing what just a couple of well-placed synth lines and a bit of distortion can do ...

What a great album. It gets a little saggy in places in the second half, but that's really the only complaint I could possibly come up with in general. If you have any interest whatsoever in the roots of ambient music, or in creative use of instrumental textures, or, heck, in just plain ole great music (sans any other qualifiers), pick up this album asap.

Then it's onto the title track, which matches the atmosphere of the name and of the album cover very well. The purpose of the low, growling "biker" guitar noises that pop up from time to time is unclear to me, but they're only a slight blight on a bunch of gorgeous guitar noodling (Fripp wouldn't really ever make heavy use of this tone in his Crimson work until some parts of the 90's incarnation, and even then only very sparsely) over strummed acoustic guitars and some whee bits of Eno here and there (particularly in the second half, when some piano pops up). In its eight minutes, it does more for me than any selected eight minute bit from No Pussyfooting could do in a million years. And then there's Evensong, which is more in the Wind on Water vein, only with a much sparser Eno presence (but still with subtle changes in volume and balance throughout), and Wind on Wind, which is actually a brief passage from the upcoming Discreet Music, featuring only Eno's synths (the intent was to provide Fripp a base on which to play over this in concert). Both of these fit in with the mood of the first two tracks splendidly, even if they're not quite as amazing, and the end result of the first half is some of the best meditation (not to mention "communal with the universe") music I can imagine. In short, it's pretty much a total triumph.

Unfortunately, the album doesn't sustain this sense of beauty throughout, which causes the rating to plummet a long ways. The second side is occupied by a single track, the 28:44 Index of Metals, which falls back into the "show-and-tell" mode of No Pussyfooting, and given that it doesn't even have academic value for me (that is, I don't see what this track accomplishes that wasn't accomplished by the tracks on that album), it's hard for me to find any enjoyment here. I'm sorry, but while it's neat that the distortion of individual guitar notes essentially ends up getting stuck to the tape as if it were flypaper, causing the distortion of the whole piece to build up over time, it's extremely difficult for me to look past the fact that it seems like there are stretches that consist of one note being sustained for about ten minutes. My brother likes it because it functions as "music by which to scare small children," but given that I don't have any particular desire to give any children nightmares anytime soon, it doesn't exactly have much use for me in that direction either. And, well, did I mention that it's 28:44?

So basically this is an album that starts off fantastic and ends up buried in a giant pile of, well, Metals. If you can find some way to get the first side without the second, jump at it; if you decide to pay full price for this, be very aware that only half of it is good (at least, if you trust my taste at all).

The thing is, as you can see from the pretty low rating, I don't find this album very good, even though I'm fond of a lot of Eno's ambient work. The first side consists of the half-hour title track, in which the "music as wallpaper" idea is made manifest, but which doesn't do much to convince me that that's a great idea. You see, the other defining attribute of the track is that it's not so much written as it is simulated. Basically, Brian wrote out a couple of simple (not to mention quiet) melody snippets of differing lengths, set them up to loop repeatedly and simultaneously through a recording device, and limited himself to 'interfering' only by modifying the tones and textures of the snippets as they passed through the recording system. The end result is ... about what you'd expect. It is a piece without beginning and without end, one that has some beauty to it but also some serious discomfort (given that the two melody snippets inevitably clash in some places, at least as much as "clash" can be applied to two pieces that are so quiet), and one which can very arguably be disqualified as real music.

The thing is, I kinda like the general idea of what Brian did in setting up this piece, and I think it's pretty clever. The problem is that I see it as clever from a scientific point of view, not from a music point of view; it's a neat concept, but it's one that somebody without any talent or even interest in music could have come up with (the fact that it came from somebody with as strong of a talent in pop music as Eno simply makes him that much more fascinating). Brian's best ambient work had his soul embedded into it, even if it was distilled into a rather abstract form; by recording this track in such a mechanical way, the track is rendered soulless (even though the individual snippets are lovely in and of themselves), and that hurts a lot.

The second side gets away from the wallpaper of the first side, but it's also extremely "academic" in a twisted way, which may put off some people (it kinda does with me). The three tracks here are each variations on Pachabel's Canon, which are each rendered almost unrecognizable by the tweaks Eno puts in. In the first track, Eno slows down each of the string parts in the piece, with the slowdown rate at a given moment for each instrument determined by how low the pitch of that instrument's part is. The second track matches sequences of notes from the piece with time signatures taken from other places, and the third gives to each instrument a repeated part that starts at the same time as the other parts but lasts for a differing amount of time from the others, meaning that there's an awful lot of clashing after a while. These tracks are ... interesting, but not particularly rousing in any way. One thing they're definitely not is pretty; these deconstructions are so severe that they're really discomforting to listen to, which is something given the source material.

So what's to be made of this album? Well, it's revolutionary as hell, and from a theoretical perspective it's certainly interesting ... but as much as I like to give credit to historically important albums that I don't necessarily enjoy tremendously, this just feels and sounds so awkwardly inhumane that I just can't give it more than grudging respect. Mark Prindle actually went so far as to give this a 1, and while I wouldn't go that far (the first side isn't anywhere near as offensive at any point as would be needed to merit such a grade), I can certainly tell where he's coming from. It's worth a listen, but not too much more.

I mean, when the All-music Guide says that Schone Hande (I know there are supposed to be dots over the o and a in that name, but I'm too lazy to look up the proper html codes for them) and Steinsame are "emotionally rich," all I can think is that Germans and lovers of German music have really screwed up definitions of emotional richness. Schone Hande has a somewhat intriguing "wobbly" synth sound, but the trio doesn't really do anything with it (and no, I don't think all the blips and plunks in the background count), and Steinsame's synth sound is so ugly and so opposite of the kind of sound I like to hear from Eno (I mean, this is practically the negative of the glorious sound produced by, say, Becalmed) that I can't stand it. And One, well, the less said about that the better; that there's some ugly use of sitar (or whatever it is that's imitating it) feedback, and that it lasts six minutes doesn't help.

Of the other six tracks, Selange doesn't really stand out for better or for worse, but the other five interest me enough to at least drive the album's rating up to a six. The opening Ho Renomo has some very pretty piano tinklings that are overlaid with some quiet rhythmic organy synths, some sounds that kinda strike me as the synth equivalent of hitting an anvil with a hammer and a bunch of "buzzing" sounds that instantly remind me of the album's cover. Wehrmut is dark and foreboding, but in a good way (the darkest elements come from the lowest-pitched repetitions of the track's main four-note theme), the minute-and-a-half Mit Simaen has a perverse sort of beauty in its simple melody, and Die Bunge has the album's one slight glimpse of levity with a goofy "galloping" rhythmic line that sounds like a cross between part of a Western movie and the music on a carnival merry-go-round. And finally, closing out the album is the best track here, the strangely beautiful Fur Luise, which is a bunch of lovely sustained chords with swirling "woo" noises (yeah, I know George Starostin described them the same way, but that's what they are) that get longer and louder and weirder as the piece progresses. It sounds interesting, but more than that I find it really moving; it's kinda like what I would expect to hear in the background during a particularly emotional moment of a high quality sci-fi or fantasy movie.

Still, while these five tracks are quite nice, the rest of the album irritates me enough that I can't give this a high grade. It's particularly disappointing given that I enjoy the second Cluster/Eno collaboration, After the Heat, as much as I do, but that's for later. There's certainly good reason for a major fan of German electronica to want this, but casual Eno fans probably shouldn't bother.

Funnily enough, while I consider this the best of Eno's output (both from his own solo career and from his many many side collaborations), it's also one of the least overtly revolutionary albums he'd do in the 70's (when he was breaking barriers left and right). Side A consists of four up-tempo pop songs that kinda seem like more refined versions of some songs on Tiger Mountain (as well as a short eerie instrumental), and side B consists of four mid-tempo (and slower) folk-pop ballads heavily crossed with some ambient trappings (as well as one full-blown ambient instrumental). Now, I can see where that would put a lot of people off to the album right away; one could very easily shrug one's shoulders after giving this a listen and say something like, "Well, it's ok, but he's not really doing anything radically different from what he's done before." By Eno's standards of breaking ground, I can definitely concede this point; however, by normal standards, these songs (to my ears) only match his previous work in the broadest of categorical strokes. He's not really borrowing any of his previous textures (there's some similarity to his concurrent work on Low and "Heroes," but even then I think it's kinda overstated), and he's definitely not borrowing any of his previous melodies; what more need be demanded?

Ultimately, eight of these ten tracks (ie all except for the instrumentals, which are still terrific) are a small world unto themselves, and what's more is that, against heavily stacked odds, this collection of songs really works as an album, despite the huge disparity between the approaches of sides A and B (why this happens I'll get to later). Side A is cited as disappointing by both Mark Prindle and Capn'Marvel, but I can't really understand how or why that should be the case. The opening No One Receiving is a little less classic than the other songs on here, and is definitely a less grabbing opener than, say, Needle in the Camel's Eye, but dismissing it solely as a throwaway attempt at a funk groove just blows my mind. The harsh deconstructionism of the album (the big trick of the entire album is taking fully arranged recordings of the tracks and cutting out layers of the arrangements in unpredictable ways, leading to a sound where basically every instrument has a well-defined 'kick' to it) is in full bloom on this track, and the hypnotic off-kilter drum machine patterns (Phil Collins) mix with the tight rhythm guitar (Paul Rudolph) and double basslines (Rudolph, Percy Jones) in a controlled frenzy that perfectly fits with Eno's (once again) amazing vocal melody and all the nervous guitar plinging and synth grooving he throws in. Backwater is even better, though, with Eno's rhythmic piano gelling with the robotic (in a good way) drums of Jaki Liebezeit (that's right, the Can dude) into the perfect foundation for one of the most brilliantly goofy vocal melodies I've heard in some time. And the lyrics, holy cow; these are some impressive absurdities right here. "There was a senator from Ecuador who talked about a meteor that crashed on a hill in the south of Peru, and was found by a conquistador who took it to the emperor, and he passed it on to a Turkish guru. His daughter was slated for becoming divine. They all taught her, they taught her how to split and define. But if you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics you will find that their minds rarely move in a line. So, it's much more realistic to abandon such ballistics and resign to be trapped on a leaf in the vine." If I were to ever write an absurdist verse of lyrics, I'd kill to come up with something even a hundredth as inspired as that.

Lessee, then there's Kurt's Rejoinder, a speedy, rhythmically jerky attack of Dave Mattacks on drums, Percy Jones once more on bass (playing a bunch of killer lines), samples of one Kurt Schwitters blabbering who knows what splattered all over the place, and Brian quickly singing out more of his own brand of insane, paranoid lyrics ("Celebrate the loss of one and all all all and separate the torso from the spine. Burger Bender bouncing like a ball, ball, ball so Burger Bender bargain blender shine."). It's meaningless, but the way he mixes rhyhmes and bizarre alliterations in this track is something that really sucks me in here, and the melody, oh the melody.

A brief respite comes in the brief Energy Fools the Magician, a two-minute interaction of some crazy basslines (the "Energy") with Eno's synths (the "Magician," I suppose) that sounds just as eerie as one would hope a piece with such a title would sound. And then we hit the climax/conclusion of the first side, one of the greatest songs Eno would ever do in his life; the amazing, phased-to-oblivion rhythmic pounding piano-boogie "rocker" King's Lead Hat. Cripes, it has Fripp and Manzanera playing on it; how could such a confluence occur on a Brian Eno album without resulting in a rhythmic dream come true? And man, to have this rhythm combined with these dissonant piano poundings combined with this vocal delivery ("Time and motion, time and tide; all I know and all I have is time and time and tide is on my side!") is to create one of the greatest New Wave experiences I could ever imagine in a million years. If, after downloading this song and giving it a couple of listens, you're not totally convinced of the need to get this album (like I was), then you shouldn't read this page any further; Eno is simply not for you.

So that's the first side. The second side, for the most part, is completely different; it's slow, it's moody, and it's sooooo atmospheric that it will be tempting to simply say that Eno is merely replicating the Low/"Heroes" pattern of "first side aggressive, second side passive/ambient." In my mind, that's somewhat true, but I also think he manages to transcend the pattern via the amazing accomplishment of one of the tracks (more on that later). As for the other four tracks on the side, only one isn't jaw-drop-through-the-floor quality, and even that (the five-minute instrumental Through Hollow Lands) would have been a highlight on both Tiger Mountain and Another Green World. Julie with ..., then, is a pop ballad that also manages to serve (in my opinion) as validation for Eno's pursuit of that whole Ambient thing, since the AMAZING vocal melody is only the final touch to one of the most brilliantly relaxing and hypnotic pieces I've ever seen. Except for Paul Rudolph's quiet bass, everything in this track comes from Eno's hands, right down to the solitary guitar twangs that seem to pop up at exactly the right times and that pluck my heart strings in just the right ways. And with the vocal melody, as well as the atmospheric lyrics, you have one of the world's only examples of "epic ambient pop ballad," which is just an amazing accomplishment in my eyes.

Up next is By This River, a collaboration with Cluster that absolutely knocks the snot out of everything on the Cluster and Eno album. What amazes me most about this track is just how still the atmosphere created by this track is; I really feel like it's just me on the banks of a non-drifting river on a windless day, in an atmosphere of complete peace and quiet and security. And the melody, well, it may seem repetitive to keep saying, "This song has such an awesome melody!" but what else can be done? It's amazing what can be done with just a small number of keyboard chords, after all.

After Through Hollow Lands comes the album's finale, the grandiose, epic and totally cathartic ballad Spider and I, which is basically the greatest Syd Barrett ballad that Syd never got the chance to pen before going totally nuts. Of course, Syd likely wouldn't have thought to use such an incredibly perfect set of synth tones, but the way Eno sings the simple vocal melody reminds me so much of Syd at his very very best that it can't help but pull my heartstrings even more than it would otherwise. It's just devestatingly powerful, even if on paper it isn't entirely obvious why it should be.

Yet for all of this, one might be tempted to say something to the effect of, "Well, the songs on side two are wonderful, but do they really fit in with herky-jerky energy of the first side? By putting all the energetic songs on side one and all the mellow songs on side two, the cohesion of the album is made non-existant." And this could be true, were it not for the one remaining piece of the album; the keystone, the track that holds everything together and makes this album work as a whole. Here He Comes is an amazing song in its own right; the melody is gorgeous, the feel is mildly upbeat yet mellow, the bass solo in the middle that carries the melody is a pleasure and a half to listen to, and so on. Yet what makes this track so divine to my ears is that it accomplishes something that I cannot imagine any other track in the world pulling off; the album has only this one track as a buffer between the rhythmic fury of King's Lead Hat and powerful ambience of Julie with ..., and yet the transition from the former to the latter not only doesn't feel awkward, it feels (to my ears) absolutely seamless. Because of Here He Comes, instead of the album feeling like "half energetic nerd rock, half ambient balladry," it ends up feeling like the sound of the album slowly melts around my ears as it plays, and that is an incredible feeling and vibe to experience. And that's ultimately why this album is able to be rated as high as it is; it works as well as an album as anything else in my collection, despite the fact that, in theory, it shouldn't even come close to doing so.

So there's my gushing review of Eno's best work. I know there are some people who don't see this as a masterpiece, but I just cannot share this perspective. If you put any stock in my opinions whatsoever, please please please get this album and give it three or four listens (I admit that I wasn't blown away on first listen). I don't give it a 15 because I don't think the songs of the first side are perfect enough to warrant the highest grade possible for the album, but it's very very very close. Buy it next chance you get.

So anyway, this album keeps a fairly good balance of "pretty" and "weird," and while the two sides don't gel as perfectly as they did on, say, Another Green World (not to mention that there are no "normal" songs to complement these two sides), they gel well enough to make this into a moderately enjoyable listening experience. The good news about the "pretty" songs is that, while some of them do fall into the category of "tapping almost mindlessly on one keyboard note at a time, making it destined solely for background listening," a number of them derive their prettiness from something at least somewhat different from this stereotype of ambient music. From the Same Hill, for instance, makes extensive use of single, firmly-plucked acoustic guitar notes that almost end up sounding Spanish to my ears, while the three part Sparrowfall relies on a minimalistic synth-piano melody so bloody gorgeous that I could die a happy man while listening to it. I'm also very fond of Events in Dense Fog, which really matches its name for me; it actually sounds to me like there's something resembling a "real" melody in there, but it gets intermittently covered up and obscured by, well, whatever the musical equivalent of fog would be. Color me impressed.

The weird stuff, though, is where this album really earns its keep. Alternative 3, for instance, strikes me as the sort of thing that would have been perfect to play for that part in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the team of scientists is approaching the monolith on the moon; it's just so alien, for lack of a better word, that I want to keep hearing it again and again. There is Nobody conveys a similar sense of alien landscape gloom as well. Switching mood gears, Patrolling Wire Borders has a nagging low-pitched synth-cello sound that actually does make it seem appropriate for a spying scene in a war movie, while Task Force would be perfectly appropriate for an elite military, well, task force moving in close to its main target.

The real highlight, though, is M386, which I think many people will appreciate just because it's basically the only track on here to make extensive use of multiple underlying rhythms and textures, making it sort of a throwback to the days of Another Green World, except for being a lot more disturbing than anything from there. All sorts of low-pitched moans and growls jump out at me when listening to this, and in conjunction with the "main" synth melody laid on top of everything, this track seems to me just as much of a classic as any other instrumental tracks Eno had done to this point.

Alas, there are a lot of other tracks on this album, and while they're certainly acceptable background listening (meaning I don't consider them bad), it says something that, even after a good seven or eight listens to this album, I still can't figure out what the heck to say about them. The biggest drawback to this album, overall, is that while there's an interesting balance of mood due to the relatively large number of tracks, there's actually a fairly limited amount of blatant imagery due to the tracks not sticking around long enough to prompt a tangible vision to associate with them. Regardless, though, if that's not the kind of thing that you consider most important in listening to ambient-based music, you'll very likely enjoy this album, and it should definitely be picked up at some point.

Plus, it helps that there's a MAJOR classic on this one, The Belldog, which features one of the most incredibly hypnotic main synth lines that I've ever heard in my life, and builds layers upon layers of synths and piano around it and tops it off with a terrific vocal melody about receiving snippets of encoded transmissions. It's hard to describe in text why it is that I find this track so awesome, but if you haven't heard this, you have to just take my word for it when I say this is six minutes of pure sonic bliss and total friggin' catharsis, and believe me, that's not something I say about electronic proto-trance (I guess) compositions on a regular basis. Every fan of Eno (and yes, of Cluster too) needs to hear this at some point.

The rest of the album isn't as flabbergasting as that track, but except for Oil (which I just can't help but think of as four minutes of largely wasted space; it just reminds me too much of the weaker moments on Cluster and Eno), all of the tracks feature something that I enjoy quite a bit. A couple of them (the lovely piano-based Luftschloss, the brief, vaguely playful Light Arms) might seem a bit too "lightweight" in comparison to the relatively stern atmosphere of the rest of the album (which is the most obvious contribution of the Germans to this album; Eno never got this kind of overall mood on his own), but I can't really think of that as a tremendous negative here. These tracks are just less elaborate than the other songs, is all; they're quite enjoyable while on. As for the others, the most impressive ones (to my ears) are the opening Foreign Affairs (which features a solid rhythmic pulse in the synths and uses low-pitched, pounding pianos in a much better way than the requiem-like pieces on Cluster and Eno), the bizarre-as-hell Tzima N'arki (which features yet another hypnotic sequence of rhythmic synths, overlaid with Eno singing the chorus to King's Lead Hat backwards (!!)), and Broken Head, which has (in addition to the standard cool rhythm) one of the best synth-bass sounds I've heard in some time and such delightful lines as, "I was just a broken head, I stole the world that others punctured. Now I stumble through the garbage; slide and tumble, slide and stumble."

The "lesser" tracks are cool too, though; Base and Apex, for instance, matches its title well by having two synth-lines moving independent of another, one of which is low and moderately tweaked and distorted (and bounces around funnily) and the other of which is heavenly and lovely and all that rot. The Shade is a nice pleasant instrumental that's largely in the vein of the best stuff on Cluster and Eno, and the closing Old Land is a fabulous cross between the angelic statics of Becalmed and the atmosphere of Fur Luise, and that's a pretty solid complement right there. It's a perfect close to the album, too, and comes as close to matching the album cover as anything I could think of.

If there's any overall gripe, I guess it would be that the album doesn't really transcend the electronic music genre in the way that Another Green World does, and as such I don't really enjoy the album more than I do an average 12 album. But man, for me, a 12 is an extremely high grade for an album of this kind, and I would highly recommend it for any and all fans of Eno's better-known work.

The notable exception is the opening (duh) 1/1, a collaboration with Robert Wyatt of The Soft Machine and one Rhett Davies in which, for about 17 minutes, Wyatt plays a piano melody repeatedly while Eno augments the melody with his synths. Aside from the fact that the melody snippets are really quite lovely, there's an underlying rhythm (believe it or not) to the whole thing that I find very soothing and hypnotic. It's like, I dunno, listening to the tide ebb and flow on the shores of the sea; this may not be the most exciting listening prospect, but for me, this track does a terrific job both pleasing my ear and soothing my soul, and what else is ambient for if not that?

Unfortunately, the rest of the album doesn't quite work on the same level for me. 2/1 features the encoded vocal harmonies of three women played in a bunch of ways over nine minutes, and for whatever reason the way they manifest themselves here doesn't move me in anywhere near the same way the melodies of 1/1 does. 1/2 brings back the piano of 1/1, but the feel is a lot more, I dunno, sporadic than on 1/1, and while I could see the voices here working in a relaxing manner in a different context, the way they come out here isn't extremely convincing. And finally, 2/2 is certainly pleasant enough, but it's not really any kind of "pretty" that I can sign off on. I don't hate it, but I could certainly be perfectly happy to never hear it again.

In the end, the album comes out to a fairly low 6/10. It's not offensive, and about 30% of it is totally great for what it is, but the rest of it strikes me as little more than "average" ambient music. It's important, yes (I mean, what album can you think of that could have been called Rock 1 or Pop 1?), but I probably won't break this out again for a very long time.

I think that the biggest key to this album being superior to 1, as blasphemous as it may sound, is that Eno isn't the primary composer on these songs. With so much of his life force being spent on his Talking Heads work, this wasn't really a time when he would be especially able to balance his experimental side and his "real" music side in the way that usually set him apart from the rest of the pop music world, and I kinda suspect that if his 2nd entry in the Ambient series had been another true solo album, it would have been more of 1. Here, though, by outsourcing the actual meat of the project to somebody else, he was able to avoid spreading himself too thin, and the result was a perfectly enjoyable album.

I have absolutely no intention of even attempting to go through this album track by track; I can suffice to say that the songs are (a) mostly pretty as background music and (b) quite evocative of their titles, meaning that actual imagery can be dug up while listening to it. I would point out, though, that Not Yet Remembered is absolutely gorgeous, not so much for the very simple (and pretty derivative, though nice to listen to anyway) piano melody but for the effect of Eno's otherworldly synth-harmonies that are laid on top starting a little more than a minute into the piece.

This review is short, yes, but please make no mistake; the world needs more ambient (or whatever you want to call this) albums like this, with this kind of otherworldly beauty surrounding my ears and making the world calmer and lovelier. I can't give it a higher grade because, well, it's hard for an ambient album to get a higher grade than this from me, and this isn't the very best ambient I've ever heard, but it's up there. And it goes without saying that if you're one of those New Age music people, you should be all over this.

Then again, though, further listens reveal this to be closer to ambient than one might suspect. What is ambient music, after all, but the incessant repetition of a small number of simple musical phrases over an extended period of time for the purpose of establishing a unified mood or vibe? On both sides of this album, this is exactly what Laraaji does; he may be playing faster and more compact phrases on the first side (called The Dance on this album, split into three tracks) than on the second (called Meditation, split into two tracks), but this album is nonetheless all about repetition and atmosphere. That it's done primarily using a plucked instrument instead of a "pressed" instrument is largely irrelevant, as the overall effect is the same as on Eno's other ambient albums; it's just that the texture is different.

Of course, the album is pretty much melodyless in a "traditional" sense, but that doesn't prevent it from being an extremely enjoyable listen. The Dance is appropriately titled, not because anything about it would inspire the listener to get up and shake his groove thang, but rather because it's so uplifting and life-affirming (in the kind of way that the synth loop of Baba O'Reilly is life-affirming) that it can make the listener want to get up and dance in celebration of the goodness of life. Yes, that's a very "new-age" statement that I just wrote, which might put some off, but I can't help it; if listening to the first half of this album can't make you feel happier than you felt before listening to it, than there's just something off about your soul. These zither tones are just so BRIGHT and SHINY and HAPPY, even if they're not playing anything whose development can be traced without an incredible amount of effort, that I can't help getting an incredible amount of enjoyment out of this side.

The two Meditation tracks are a bit of a comedown, as the ditherings get more "diffuse" and the synths become more prominent, but they're still very lovely, and they work effectively as a complement to the first side. And hey, if you're an ambient "purist," this will probably please you more than the first side, as it comes a whole lot closer to the traditional idea of ambient than that side (then again, those who don't like ambient might end up dreading this side, so whatever). It's hard to be upset with sounds this lovely and this close to sounding like harps, anyway.

So that's the third album in Eno's Ambient series; not only is it arguably the best one yet, it's also the one that expands the definition of "ambient" music the furthest, which means it's also the one of the three that I respect the most (even if it has the least amount of Eno involvement to date). As far as pure background music goes, this gets among my highest recommendations.

I have to admit, this album sounds really freaking cool, but unfortunately my enjoyment is tempered by the fact that the formula starts to get old for me about halfway through. This album is all about sound, not "music" per se, and when the sound is all essentially based around the same idea, it's very difficult for me not to get tired of it after a while. I've seen this compared to Peter Gabriel's Passion, but that's a bit of a rough comparison, if only because Passion sounds (to me, anyway) like honest-to-goodness real music, and stirs real emotions within me, whereas this definitely does not. It's yet another science project, and while it's a science project of the highest level (I'm giving it a very good grade, after all, because I really think it deserves it), it's another one of those albums that I have to tip my hat to more than I really "enjoy."

Regardless, if you can't get sucked in by the grooves of America is Waiting or, say, the awesome rhythmic preacher rantings of Help Me Somebody (to just name a couple of examples), there's something not quite right with your ears. If you're going to own only one sample-based album, this is most certainly the one to have.

The album starts on a fairly promising note, with a couple of tracks making extensive use of low, rumbling synth sounds not used very much to this point in Eno's work. The opening Lizard Point also has a cool spacey feel that's much like what one later finds on Apollo, and while I can't really feel the contributions of Eno's collaborators on this track (this is the only track on the album, btw, that's not credited solely to Eno), it's a fine bit of bleak mood setting. The Lost Day is a bit overlong at 9+ minutes, but it has a GREAT menacing theme that repeatedly pops up starting a couple of minutes in, and it really gives a sense of, I dunno, being trapped in a dark place and completely losing all sense of time (hence making each day spent in this place a "lost day").

Following these two tracks is what I consider the peak of the album, the effect-laced Tal Coat. It might seem a bit disconcerting to have these incessant bleeps and bloops up against sounds of bubbling water and the various synth textures, but for some reason it seems to entrance me just fine. Besides, it has that nice little piano snippet that pops up about two-and-a-half minutes, which gives an unexpected dose of beauty to the proceedings, and the intensity of the synths picks up after this, so there you go.

After this point, though, the album starts to lose me a bit, though absolutely none of it offends me in any way. I can give a half-hearted thumbs up to Shadow, which combines various Easterny wind instruments playing discordant bits over processed samples of the kind of sounds you'd hear at night deep in the woods, but what comes afterwards has more or less completely escaped me. I mean, the last four tracks all set fairly emotional moods into which I can basically lose myself while listening, but the moods are still awfully abstract, and not much really sticks to my ribs. I like how A Clearing has a, well, clearer sound to it than the tracks around it, playing up the title well, but that's about all that jumps out at me. Well, ok, I do get a feeling of mourning when listening to Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960, but that's about all I can say.

Still, all in all, this is a perfectly decent, perfectly solid piece of background music, and one I have no problem giving a low 7 to. Parts of it really suck me in, and the rest of it basically interests me when it's playing, and that's enough for me with ambient. Maybe you might consider giving a grade as high as a 7 to an album that just works on that level to be extreme, but I'll just say that I'd be just as willing to listen to this at random as, say, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour or any other 7(10) album on my site.

So what's it like? It's very slow, deliberate, subtly grandiose, and more in line with 2001 than Star Wars, and dagnabbit that's how it should be. This may bug you, but it delights me; I prefer shots of space to make me meditative and contemplative of my place in the universe, about the immense beauty that stretches on for billions of miles in every direction, about how it's a great big universe and we're all really puny, we're just tiny little specks about the size of Mickey Rooney ... oh, sorry. The point is, I'm the kind of person who, when playing the game Homeworld, actually enjoys harvesting because it gives me time to look at the pretty nebulas in the background, so the thought of treating space in a slow, steady manner is something that appeals to me.

It also helps that the tracks on here are able to provoke clear imagery in my mind, and that these images are ones that I'm very happy to partake of (not to mention that the album has a flow that makes terrific sense to me). Of course, since I haven't seen the film itself, these images will likely not correspond to the types of footage they actually accompanied, but still, isn't it nice when you can create your own movie in your head to go with an album? Under Stars and Under Stars II both create in my mind the image of being in space and the picture slowly moving across the entirety of the heavens, seeing millions of little points of light dotting the darkness. From a musical angle, the first makes good use of combinations of higher-pitched, "bubbly" keyboard notes and lower sounds, and the second acts similarly while still sounding not much like the first (some of the sounds pulled out in II are truly "heavenly" sounds, if you can read me).

The Secret Place and Matta both create images in my mind of the surface of the moon, slowly taking in both the fascinating contours and the utter desolation and lifelessness of it. Signals reminds me of floating through the emptiness of space, surrounded by nothing, yet having all sorts of waves of various frequencies shooting past me at all times, engulfing me in feedback I don't even know is there. An Ending (Ascent), which is one of the few ambient pieces I can think of to have made any sort crossover into the "mainstream" (i.e. I've actually heard it used in commercials; the other piece, of course, is this album's Deep Blue Day), makes me imagine the mixed feelings of elation and sadness that would come from having to ascend from the moon's surface back to the ship floating above; that it's one of the most beautiful slow loops of synths I've ever heard is a nice bonus as well. And closing out the first side, we have Drift, which (if I were to have been in charge of matching up footage with music) I would have matched with footage of the lunar module drifting towards the command module for the rendezvous. Again, not particularly exciting, but still rather entrancing.

So that's the first side. The second side is somewhat different, which somewhat bothers many people, in that Daniel Lanois plays a great deal of steel guitar over Eno's synths, which I've seen argued breaks the mood terribly. I don't agree, however. What the first plucks of Daniel's steel guitar in Silver Morning (a solo Lanois composition, by the way) signal for me is a change from the overpowering blackness of the first side, brought on by rays of the sun popping over the earth's horizon (or something along those lines; give me a break, I'm not an astronomer). There's a great sense of warmth to this track and especially to its followup, Deep Blue Day, which achived some fame by making it onto the soundtrack for Trainspotting. This makes me think of gazing at the blue oceans of the earth while floating high in space, and the interaction between the steel guitar and the absolutely heart-stoppingly gorgeous synths just gets me every time.

Weightless is a slightly more "lightweight" (heh) number than the other pieces on the album, but it's for the better; it makes me think of what must be nearly never-ending amusement from floating around the command and lunar modules, having nothing to pull you down or up or any which way. And then we have my other favorite of the album, Always Returning, which makes me imagine the sun disappearing over the earth's horizon, giving me a sense of awe at the slow majestic beauty that is the interaction between the earth, sun and the rest of the cosmos. But forget that; if you don't find this simple melody and the way it's arranged jaw-droppingly beautiful, I'm not sure we'll get along that well in the end.

The album ends back in darkness, with the eight minute Stars. Were I to have chosen the footage to match this with, it would have been with a focus on one area of the sky that was particularly dense in stars, and then a slow and steady continual focus inward on that area for the entire time. This piece may seem like it goes forever, but hell, so does the universe, and all these little electric piano *plings* over the heavenly foundation just reinforces that. It's boring on a surface level, yes, but I wouldn't have any other ending to this album.

So there you have my thoughts on my favorite ambient album ever. I will concede that I didn't talk an awful lot about the music itself, choosing instead to focus on the imagery and feelings generated by the music, which may cause you to raise your eyebrow and say that I'm raving over something without much "substance." This is true, and if this aspect of ambient music is something that you absolutely cannot get past, then you'll consider this album the same BS new-age shlock that you probably consider all ambient albums. If, however, you listen to this in the right frame of mind, ready to allow your mind to use this to create its own entertainment, rather than the music actively entertaining you itself, you can find this just as enjoyable as I do. Please get it.

So I should give this a one and be done with it, right? Well, no, and the reason is that, despite all that I've said so far, I like having it on. Note that I specifically did not say, "I like listening to it," but instead said "I like having it on." As long as I'm not trying to actively listen to the album, but instead use it as a background to doing something else, this album is uncannily consistent at improving my overall sense of well-being. The texture and, yes, the main theme are so totally pleasant that I can never help but feel pleased that I decided to put this album on while I read my scriptures or putzed on the internet or whatever. This album is the closest thing I can think of to "aural baking soda;" it's kinda blech on its own, but it tends to improve my experience in doing whatever I'm doing so much that it can't help but have a place in my life. In that regard, from the perspective that ambient music is to be experienced as part of the background and not as something to be actively listened to, this is arguably the best ambient album ever, even if I don't enjoy it on its own to any reasonable degree.

For this reason, I give it a 5(8), which is a mediocre grade in the grand scheme of things but an incredibly high rating for an album that fails almost completely as "normal" music. As long as you have the right expectations for it and use it in the proper way, it's a worthwhile inclusion to any Eno collection. Even if it technically sucks ass.

This is all the more bothersome given that the actual melodies are really quite good. All three tracks listed above have danged good (if lightweight, but hell, Backwater wasn't exactly heavy and serious) vocal hooks and solid twists that are instantly recognizable as worthy of classic Eno. Some tracks are a little close to embarrassing (I remember being kinda iffy about both Been There, Done That and the circus-y Crime in the Desert), but from a pure tuneage standpoint the songs are mostly solid. The opening Lay My Love is my favorite, mainly because the quality vocal melody (with some awfully strange lyrics; "I am the termite of temptation," huh?) is matched with a terrific repeated violin line, but a number of songs come fairly close. Two Cale-sung numbers, in particular, are quite nice (and largely avoid the arrangement pitfalls of the rest of the album), the moody In the Backroom and, especially, the lovely Cordoba. And finally, the album closer, The River, is a terrific anthem (and really the only track with Eno vocals that doesn't make me cringe at all) that leaves a nice taste in my mouth, symbolically washing away a lot of the synthesized crud found elsewhere.

This review is extremely short because it's very difficult to find significant descriptive elements beyond, "Good songs, cruddy sound." When Eno and Cale hooked up 15 years earlier to work on some of the AGW tracks, the results were Sky Saw and Golden Hours; here, the highest they could aspire to were Lay My Love, The River and the basic structure of One Word. Still, though, while the album might be a disappointment relative to hopes and expectations, it's not even remotely bad on its own, and a worthwhile acquisition for fans of both Eno and Cale.

Subsequent listens improved my attitude at least a little bit, though. I still find several tracks to be mostly a waste of space; Pierre in Mist, for instance, gets ok after a while, but the initial clumsiness of the sound never really goes away. Ali Click is waaaay too generic sounding for my tastes, The Roil, The Choke is arguably the least interesting track with vocals that Brian's ever done, and a bunch of others just fade into background oblivion for me. Some of the tracks really work, though. It should be noted, first, that it's largely inappropriate to just say this is an "electronica" album; the drums are actually mostly played by human hands, and as cold and emotionless as the synths sound almost all the time, there's still at least a glint of inspiration to be found. If I had to make a comparison, I'd say that a lot of this actually sounds like the instrumentals on THRAK, the first album of the then-yet-to-be-realized 90's incarnation of King Crimson; it's no coincidence, then, that in the second half of the otherwise uninteresting Distributed Being, there's an aggressive solo that's instantly identifiable as Fripp.

Back to the point, highlights include the opening Fractal Zoom, which sets the mood of the rest (for better and worse) with a cool percussion rhythm, swirling synth noises and various eerie vocal harmonies that, at the very least, show Eno can still write something that's both aggressive and interesting. I severely disliked this track at first, but it's a definite grower. The same can be said for What Actually Happened?, with a fabulous drum sound, encoded vocals (sounding an awful lot like what the vocals in Deception of the Thrush would end up sounding; please don't tell me that 90's King Crimson stole half its ideas from Nerve Net of all places ...) and an overall sense of confusion that's both disorienting and fascinating. And, of course, there's Web, which is done in two different mixes (as two consecutive tracks, making it just about seem like a 15 minute suite near the end) and features all sorts of chaotic guitar and synth sound repeatedly building, climaxing and dissolving around an endlessly repeated piano note. Now here's a track that really matches the album cover; I can sense being surrounded by a sea of red, on the one hand, and little white flashing neurons, on the other, much more easily here than anywhere else on the album. The first mix is the superior one, but the second one (which buries the piano note further down) has its upsides too. And finally, as a denoument we have Decentre, a kinda jazzy piano meandering that has no memorable theme but provides nice atmosphere and a comfortable way to close the album.

Overall, there's some really nice work on this album, but way too much of it (even in parts of the tracks I like) feels, well, un-Eno-like. I liked Eno for creating beep-beep music that didn't sound like the beep-beep music which would come from others years later; now that his beep-beep music sounds so inhumane and, to a lesser extent, derivative, it's hard to get too excited about it. So much for Eno taking over the 90's.

So do I enjoy having this album on? Yeah, I do, but the downside is that while all of the tracks are distinctive and sometimes even interesting when on, they don't all really stick with me when the album's done. There are no great emotional experiences on here like during the bulk of Plateaux of Mirror, for instance. Still, it's an awfully pleasant experience, and I don't mind getting lost inside the sound once in a while.

There are a couple of things that bother me tremendously about this album that ensure it the kind of low grade that I have refused to grant to any of Eno's ambient albums to this point. The first, obviously, is the alarming sparseness of the sound, which is empty and unengaging even by the standards of ambient. I mean, there's minimalism, and then there's nothingism, which Neroli certainly qualifies for. The more troubling aspect, though, the one that ensures this a low grade, is that this doesn't even work as ambient music. It goes without saying that something this diffuse isn't going to provoke any real imagery, and furthermore the "theme" and the Phrygian scale he decides to base it in manages to be unsettling and even fairly disturbing. There sure isn't any calming effect on me when I listen to this, and I don't feel any improvement to my sense of being when I play this in the background like I do with TA.

The end result, then, is that this is the first Eno album I can say I have no use for. And guess what, an album that I find useless is going to get a 1(4), at most. The only thing keeping it from an even lower grade is that I can honestly say that, based on doing so little overall, it also manages to do just little enough to keep me from disliking the idea of putting it on again more than the idea of listening to The Power of Three (still the title-holder of "worst album in my collection") again. But man, that's not a compliment. Avoid this unless you're completely insane.

So the general idea of this album is to combine Eno's soundscaping abilities with trip-hop, a genre that I'm not terribly familiar with but has actually done a pretty decent job of entertaining me every time I've come across a piece of music that ostensibly has these elements. Of course, I don't really have many particularly positive (though not particularly negative either) opinions about the percussion rhythms used on this album, but the "trip" portion of the name sure works for me in more than a couple of spots on here. I'm extremely fond of Persis especially, which goes through a bunch of cool eerie chord sequences using synths whose tones will age very well over time (a notable trait for this time period, I think), and which makes use of bits of ominous violin in the second half to give the whole thing an awesome vibe.

The album also ends on a fairly high note, with the tracks Bloom and Two Voices (following this is a bonus track, an all-instrumental version of Bloom). The main gimmick of the former is that it contains voiceover recordings from the early life of Brian's daughter, which surprisingly manage to fit in extremely well with the minimalistic keyboard tapping and the lazy shuffling rhythm. It's listed as almost ten minutes, but my version stops playing with a good amount left (the same thing happens to me on the following track, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of); whatever the intended time, though, it's a track that never once makes me look at the LCD and ask how much longer it's going to last, because it's extremely comforting to listen to. The following Two Voices inexplicably finds Brian using a talkbox, but as dated as the gimmick is, I find the track very soothing for some reason, so I enjoy it.

As for the rest ... well, it's good background, and when I'm listening to it I enjoy it, but, well, you know the rest. Music to be used in the moment, and then to be flushed out of the mind once the moment is passed. Still, if you find it cheap, you should buy it.

Based on the various recordings he did in the last twenty years before this, there was no sign that Eno was going to put out a solo album of "normal" songs ever again (Wrong Way Up technically doesn't count, as it was a collaboration), and the announcement that he was going to do just that made this what must have been the most anxiously anticipated album he'd done in many, many years. Of course, this also created some unfair expectations on the part of the listening public (at least, that small faction of people who would care about Eno in the first place); I read quite a few comments prior to this album's release expressing hope that this would be the same kind of music, both in style and in quality, that Brian had done on the "big four." Needless to say, expectations of that kind are totally ridiculous; by this time, that form of Brian had only popped out once in over 25 years (the aforementioned Wrong Way Up), and to expect him to suddenly, magically return to his artistic hey-day was totally unfair. In other words, if you go into this expecting a sequel to BaAS, you'll be sorely vexed.

And that would be a shame, because this album is quite good, and it's a serious grower at that. One thing that must be accepted going in, though, is that these songs are not fast, and they're definitely not energetic. They're mostly "real" songs, yes, but they're mid-tempo and slower, and very much on the trance-like, contemplative end of the Eno spectrum. They're not borderline ambient like most of the second side of BaAS, but instead they kinda (at least, this is the closest comparison I can think of) resemble the slower tracks on Taking Tiger Mountain, so if you liked that album a lot you should be willing to dig into this somewhat.

A couple of the tracks fall soundly into the "experimental" category, and while one of them kinda fails, one of them works pretty well for me. The disappointing track is Going Unconscious, which is an ok ambient texture with a woman's voice speaking intermittently in an ice cold voice. It's ok, but seems a bit like something Eno could do in his sleep (which he probably did). The closing Bone Bomb, on the other hand, uses a spoken ice cold vocal, processed and delivered semi-rhythmically (over an enjoyable synth and guitar texture), to great creepy effect; it's essentially a representation of a woman's final thoughts before she blows herself up (!!), to get vengeance on the cruel treatment she's received in life. Sheesh, the more I listen to this track, the more horrified I get at the way the track quickly rushes to the end after the final line of, "and here ... is ... my peace ... here ... in ... this ... still ... last ... moment ... of ... my ... life ...," and I mean that in a very good way.

The rest of the album is more normal, but still interesting. I'm quite partial to the opening This, which has a very Peter Gabriel-ish production style in terms of the drums and bass sound, and which shows Eno's great ability to project the illusion of there being an actual "tune" even when the vocal melody and the chord changes he's using are at a very minimal level. The melody digs into me in that great traditional Eno way, and when he sings, "This revolver, this fire, I'll hold it up higher, higher, hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii...iiiiiiigh," it's a nice dose of catharsis. The following And Then So Clear is a bit of a step down, but it has a nice enough atmosphere, even if I'm not totally sold on the processed falsetto vocal Eno chooses to use. The following It's a Long Way Down sounds totally like it started off as one of his regular instrumental pieces (with some nice guitar plinks to go over the synths), with the vocals only as an afterthought, but they're effective if only because of the choice to have one Eno voice singing and one Eno voice speaking the vocals at the exact same time. A bit of a trifle, but a decent one.

After Going Unconscious, we come to the second real highlight of the album, Caught Between, where Eno sounds suspiciously like the modern-day John Lodge, and which has a nicely gut-wrenching simple guitar solo in the middle that mirrors the delightful (though melancholy) melody perfectly. Passing Over then takes us into the darker recesses of Eno's creative realm, with an unsettling atmosphere and a nicely dark piano meandering the middle before a menacing processed Eno voice starts saying, "GONE. GONE. THROUGH CRUMBLED FINGERS GONE. CAN NEVER BE RECOLLECTED ..." And then we come to How Many Worlds, which starts off featuring Eno playing an acoustic and singing to the dippiest, simplest chord sequence imaginable, but it manages to not suck once the violins come in (they have a nice deep texture to them the way they're done here). Just ignore the lyrics, and you'll be set.

Bottomliners HEAVILY reminds me of the Tiger Mountain style for some reason, and I end up liking it accordingly. Maybe it's just the random mention of China, but it has the same kind of low-key goofy universalism that was featured on much of that album, and when taken in conjunction with the melody, I can't help but enjoy that. Far better is what comes next, though; the wonderfully anthemic Just Another Day, a simple, hypnotic poppy number that should go down as one of the great Eno classics; so sue me, I get a small lump in my throat from the way he sings, "One day, we will put it all behind, we'll say, that was just another time, we'll say, that was just another day on Earth" with that quiet mellotron building up underneath. Perhaps I should be demanding that "pop classics" have a little more development than this, but hell, I didn't demand that of Spider and I, now did I? There's just something about this kind of simplicity coming from Eno that hits me like few things can, which is why he gets such a high rating overall in the first place.

Rounding out the album (before Bone Bomb) is Under, which I'm not so hot on overall (there's something about that arrangement that really bugs me), but which does have a standout moving moment of its own to claim (when multiple Enos sing, "Here was the place I chose to stand. Just when I think I'm going under, I ... remain"). And that's the album; it's got its ups and downs, and it has no hope of being on the same level as Eno's greatest achivements, but it's a fine return to form in the world of "regular songwriting," and it bodes well for the future if he decides to pursue this direction in subsequent releases. Which, as of this writing, I wouldn't mind at all ...