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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"

Another Green Thread

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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"

It's unseasonably nice out, so I took a walk for a couple of hours and listened to the three 1970s solo albums of his that I really like. I fell in love with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) all over again. I knew it was great, but I never remembered it being THIS great.

 

I'm going to write a bunch about Another Green World later.

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Before and After Science is my favorite Eno album. Hell, it's one of my favorite albums.

 

My love of My Love in the Bush of Ghosts is well documented, I believe.

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the spacier stuff does nothing for me. even his work with bowie leaves me more unsatisfied than most. but taking tiger mountain & here come the warm jets are very handsome albums.

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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"
Which one aren't you so high one? I've long felt Before and After Science was underrated.

Here Come The Warm Jets never caught on with me. TTM(BS) is fantastic, AGW is even more amazing, and B&AS is pretty strong as well, though sort of scattered compared to the two superior albums, which have perfect sequencing. The more ambient tracks on Before and After Science are the ones I really like: if Another Green World is a short and unseasonably warm day in early April, sunny and optimistic with fleeting beauty, that half of Before and After Science feels like a continuation of that same day, but with more of a twilight feel. Still amazingly evocative and atmospheric, but darker and cooler. Problem is that you have the songs that are stylistic callbacks to the Tiger Mountain stuff, but not as good: "King's Lead Hat" and "No One Receiving" don't really fit where Eno was going and had recently been.

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Here Come The Warm Jets is a nice album, but I think I prefer the songs on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) by a smidge. The middle sequence in TTM of "Mother Whale Eyeless", "The Great Pretender", and "Third Uncle" is probably the best run of tracks from his solo work that I've heard, in my opinion.

 

I'm also not as sold on the more ambient albums from Eno; I wouldn't dismiss them outright, since I've only really taken a cursory listen through some of them, but I wasn't blown away by my first impression.

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Is it possible to be "blown away" by ambient music on the first listen? Or at all?

 

I've said this numerous times already, but I admire Another Green World more than I like it. It's nice, pleasant, breezy stuff, but little more than that. The vocal tracks, though, are some of Eno's finest moments. Everyone points to "St. Elmo's Fire"—which is good, of course—but the zenith is "Golden Hours." Simply beautiful.

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Is it possible to be "blown away" by ambient music on the first listen? Or at all?

 

Yeah, that is a good point. Bearing that in mind, Another Green World probably deserves another spin when I get home.

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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"
Is it possible to be "blown away" by ambient music on the first listen? Or at all?

 

I've said this numerous times already, but I admire Another Green World more than I like it. It's nice, pleasant, breezy stuff, but little more than that. The vocal tracks, though, are some of Eno's finest moments. Everyone points to "St. Elmo's Fire"—which is good, of course—but the zenith is "Golden Hours." Simply beautiful.

You're right, that's an amazing song. "The Big Ship" is a real highlight for me, too, as are "Everything Merges With The Night" and "Sombre Reptiles." The only misfire on the whole album for me is that "I'll Come Running" goes on for a minute longer than it should, just repeating "I'll come running to tie your shoe" ad nauseam. As for the initial question, I see what you mean for the real ambient stuff like Music for Airports and Discreet Music, where the most you can really say about them is "well, that's that," but Another Green World is enough of a transitional album that there are still vestiges of quality songwriting and composition there, rather than just running Pachelbel's Canon through algorithms on a synthesizer. The instrumental pieces, and vocal for that matter, are the perfect length: long enough to evoke feelings and paint a mental picture, but not so long as to just drone and bore you. You get the idea, you move on to the next one. It's the art gallery as music, in a way.

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Guest Legalise Drugs and Murder

I need to put Eno back on my to-do list. I have Music for Airports, the Low Symphony with Philip Glass, three or four Fripp collaborations, and the Bowie stuff. Pick my next one.

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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"

Well, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Another Green World would be good ideas. There's some cool piano work on Ambient 2 that I put on when I'm studying.

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"Baby's On Fire" splits my head in half and makes we want to take up the guitar moreso than pretty much any other song. Only recently did Eno's pop albums really click for me, taking that hop from "hmm, this is pretty good" to "got-damn I love this." I've been listening to him pretty constantly the past two or three weeks.

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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"

Oh, I love "Backwater" too. Nice uses of internal rhyme. Eno is underrated as a lyricist.

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Problem is that you have the songs that are stylistic callbacks to the Tiger Mountain stuff, but not as good: "King's Lead Hat" and "No One Receiving" don't really fit where Eno was going and had recently been.

 

Of course, both of those tracks are my favorite songs from Before and After Science and, really, the only ones that call out for a repeat listen from me. "Julie with..." and "By The River" are decent little interludes, but the rest of the second half doesn't do much for me and the album as a whole tends to pale in comparison with his earlier stuff. I guess I just tend to like "louder" Eno more than the quieter, more ambient Eno that dominates the second half of B&AS.

 

The exception to that opinion, of course, is Another Green World, which I feel so very foolish for not really "getting" until now. I actually bought AGW years ago, in a concurrent purchase with Electric Ladyland and hours... right before I started my freshman year in college. hours... was my first Bowie album and, as you can imagine if you've ever actually listened to the album, it did a swell job of convincing me that Bowie was incredibly overrated (an opinion I'd hold for years). Electric Ladyland was an absolute trip, my initial favorite of the three albums that I got, and something that I almost never listen to nowadays, outside of an occasional jonesing for "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)."

 

But then there was AGW, which was a real puzzlement at the time. All of the tracks seemed really weird and I remember thinking, at the time, that it was like "nintendo music", for whatever reason. I liked "Sky Saw", but the rest of the tracks really didn't strike me and, being obsessed with Hendrix at the time, I pretty much left it behind in preference of Electric Ladyland. Long story short, I didn't get it and really didn't give it much of a second chance, even when I explored Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy" later on and kept hearing Brian Eno's name pop up, over and over again, as an influence.

 

So listening to it now is a bit of a revelation. "Sky Saw" is still a favorite, but the rest of the album has finally opened up for me, for lack of a better description. The only real turd is "I'll Come Running", which sticks out like "Rocky Raccoon" on the White Album for me, but virtually every other track is fantastic. I think Czech's "art gallery" comment regarding the album is very apt: the sequencing and timing on everything is perfect. Despite pushing it aside for "Crosstown Traffic" years ago, I think Another Green World is one of my favorite albums now, thanks to this thread.

 

I'm still in the process of giving the ambient albums a more attentive listen but, ultimately, I'm just happy to have caught up to the rest of the pack with AGW. The first round of really good music I've had to listen to in months.

 

Oh, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a real snore, in my opinion. The first couple of tracks are decent, but the concept really tends to drag as the album goes along - I can't imagine that the reissue (and the bonus tracks that came as a result) really helped out matters very much.

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Guest Legalise Drugs and Murder

So how 'bout those Frippertronics?

 

I'm going to purchase Another Green World next. After a little more exploration, I'm expecting to find I prefer him as a producer/studio main-man than as a composer.

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I like "I'll Come Running" more than either Czech or Blak—the "Rocky Raccoon" comparison was harsh, bro—though I concur it isn't as strong as the other songs on AGW. Eno's vocal delivery—and this may be more of an unintended vocal tic than an affected pose—sneers all over what should've been a sunny, cheeky love song. Eno doesn't sound the slightest bit serious, which may've been the point, though I think it would've worked better done straight.

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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"

I don't know what to make of this 77 Million Paintings project. It seems like a pretty cool idea, the whole idea of generative visual art, and I understand it ties in with Eno's fascination with creating generative music, but when all is said and done, isn't this just a screen saver? In one of several Eno essays/transcripts I've read, he's acknowledged that certain screen savers are built on this generative principle (namely the one where your screen keeps subdividing into tiles and shuffling, I believe), but this was years and years ago, so this probably isn't the breakthrough that Brian had in mind. Now it'd be one thing if both the audio and visuals were generative, and somehow tied together, creating an aleatoric multimedia experience, but from what I can tell, the accompaniment is just a loop of some Ambient 4-type stuff: unintelligible echoes and temple bells and talking drums.

 

Eno is producing Coldplay's new album. Once again, this probably won't be as revolutionary as Eno fusing with Talking Heads to create Remain in Light, or joining U2 to create The Unforgettable Fire, because Coldplay already has so many secondhand elements of the Eno-produced U2 already.

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Never really thought of Brian Eno as a social lubricant, but I was at a party this weekend and the host put on Here Come The Warm Jets, which was great background and got everyone talking. I think the girls may have been into it all on account of the whole Velvet Goldmine thing.

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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"

Why can't I go to parties with, though admittedly my least favorite of his, Eno albums? Once, I almost got in a fight with some guy over System of a Down.

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Guest Legalise Drugs and Murder

Or more metalheads. Sure the alternative would be Lividity or Rotting Christ, but at least it's not System of a Down.

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Guest "Go, Mordecai!"
"Baby's On Fire" splits my head in half and makes we want to take up the guitar moreso than pretty much any other song. Only recently did Eno's pop albums really click for me, taking that hop from "hmm, this is pretty good" to "got-damn I love this." I've been listening to him pretty constantly the past two or three weeks.

I may be underwhelmed by HCTWJ, but man, I love "Needles in the Camel's Eye." Most of this is just too weird and silly for me, like "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch" or "Blank Frank."

 

"My, my, my! We're treating each other just like stra-a-a-a-angers." Pass.

"BLANK! FRANK! is the messenger of your doom and your destruc-SHAWNN!!!" Pass.

 

Opening of "Dead Finks Don't Talk" remind anyone else of a Reinhold Messner track?

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Guest Czech please!
Eno is producing Coldplay's new album. Once again, this probably won't be as revolutionary as Eno fusing with Talking Heads to create Remain in Light, or joining U2 to create The Unforgettable Fire, because Coldplay already has so many secondhand elements of the Eno-produced U2 already.

You know, this didn't turn out all that poorly. I actually think it's a decent album.

 

I'm glad that whereas other albums I've dubbed my "favorites of all time" like Berlin and Loveless have been supplanted, I'll always love Another Green World. Granted, I don't overplay it, but I don't see myself ever getting tired of it.

 

Since this thread, I completed the Ambient series with Ambient 3: Day of Radiance featuring a guy named Laraaji playing a zither or something. It's awful; far too obnoxious to truly be the aural wallpaper that Eno intended with Discreet Music and the Ambient series, though I suppose that garish vertically striped salmon/mustard/burnt orange wallpaper is still wallpaper, too. Completely devoid of replay value except for dragging it up from the depths to make sure this was the shitty ambient album I was thinking of and not 4. I was right, Ambient 4 is the really abstract drone-y one.

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