Music Arcades: Brian Eno: Another Day on Earth

Curious to have this the day after Trans since, as I remember it, one of the reasons Eno gave for creating an album with singing on it was the availability of new technology for treating his voice. Can I have been the only one scratching my head, thinking, "Eh? Weren't Neil Young and your mate Laurie Anderson using vocoders for exactly that purpose in 1982?"

The other reason Eno gave was that he considered lyrics to be "one of the last remaining difficult challenges of popular music" or something like that (better quote here), one that you couldn't solve with a plug-in for CuBase or Garageband. Brian, listen to yourself: you've been reading too many research papers by your Global Business Network cronies.

As I keep saying, every new Eno album has a PR spin attached. With Drawn from Life I commented that, after leading the revolution against 'organic' music instruments in the 1970s, he had the genius idea at the start of this decade that listeners wanted to hear more organic performances. So, having also dropped songs from his repertoire after his fourth solo album, what does he do in 2005? Yep, reintroduce them. Not quite so revolutionary this time round. (And the story had to conveniently forget the songs on Wrong Way Up and Nerve Net.)

You can tell, I think, that I'm not a massive fan of the album. Not least because the spin doesn't stand up: as Eno was candid enough to admit on Mark Radcliffe's programme, there aren't actually many songs on the album; mostly they're just ambient noodles with a few words draped here and there over their contours. The best exception to this is How Many Worlds, which is really quite good (though I still prefer Nerve Net's The Roil, the Choke).

So far it's mostly Eno's albums of the last 15 years that have been cropping up on Music Arcades. In that time his writing and talking has made a deeper impression on me than his music. But I still bought each of his albums, including this one, as soon as they came out, and I'll get the next one, too (in fact the new Fripp & Eno album, Beyond Even, is waiting at home for me, yet to be unwrapped, as I write). I'm not ready to write him off.