If the others were too sloppy for you and “The Big Ship” doesn’t make you cry, then you’ll like this one best. The last of his quartet of ‘70s rock albums is Before And After Science (1977). Both foreshadow the forthcoming decades of loosely conceptual ambient tunes, but there’s still plenty of lyrics on this one, which are vanilla compared to his past work (no burning babies), but more mature and wistful, as if he just fell in (“I’ll Come Running”) and out (“Golden Hours”) of love. “Little Fishes” is an undersea playscape and the haunting “In Dark Trees” features one of the best uses of wood block in musical history. “The Big Ship” is the banger, a grandiose instrumental dirge that’s hopeless, hopeful, happy, sad, and somehow always seems to get a speck of dust into both of my eyes. The following year he released Another Green World, which leans most heavily on synthesizers. Visceral proto-punk guitarwork (“Third Uncle”), scary lullabies (“Put a Straw Under Baby”), and another epic emotional piano tune (“Taking Tiger Mountain”) are some highlights. It’s like listening to a drunk sing a story over a roulette wheel of genres. If you’re into unconventional songwriting, this is your jam. Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) from 1974 is a loose concept album about a motley crew of spies and China (maybe). After three minutes of piano balladry and guitar distortion it becomes a love letter to running away from it all with only your memories.
“Blank Frank” describes “the messenger of your doom and your destruction,” which doesn’t sound blank at all! As a vulnerable contrast, “On Some Faraway Beach” could play during the credits of a Wes Anderson film. “Baby’s On Fire” talks about, well, throwing a baby that’s on fire into a bathtub, and it gets even weirder from there. While this does result in some refrigerator magnet poetry, his knack for embodying strange characters makes him an incredibly potent lyricist. “It works from sounds to words and from words to meaning… quite the other way around from the way people normally think lyrics are written,” Eno remarked on a 1980 interview on Berkeley’s KPFA-FM. Eno downplays his lyrics by citing a process of singing gibberish syllables and replacing them with similar sounding words. If you like words, this might also be your favorite. I’m sure there’s a few fan faves that I’ve forgotten (shoutout to Public Image Ltd’s Jah Wobble on the tense ‘95 collab Spinner), but were I to mention them all this piece would be longer than an uncut version of Reflection-which, as I intimated above, is essentially infinite. Even for completists, it’s easy to pull up his Spotify page and find a handful of albums you didn’t know existed (has anyone ever actually listened to 1997’s The Drop?). Given his huge and wide-ranging output, getting into Eno can be a daunting task. And that’s not to mention his installation work, paintings, interactive phone apps, and a reissue of Oblique Strategies, a deck of 155 cards bearing creative maxims that deserves a permanent place on everyone’s desk (my current card: “Is it finished?”). An infinitely looping computer-generated composition.
A breathtaking Lou Reed cover on an otherwise ambient concept album about a ship. Singles with Nicolas Jaar and Kevin Shields. In the past decade alone he’s released collaborative albums with Byrne, Underworld’s Karl Hyde, and poet Rick Holland.
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He's also responsible, in part, for Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, introducing David Byrne to Afrobeat, four 70s rock LPs that sound like they were recorded yesterday, DEVO, U2’s studio experimentation, the Windows 95 theme, and regrettably, Coldplay. Plus, soundtracks for alien planets.Ĥ6 years since he began his career as Roxy Music’s resident synth weirdo, we have him to thank for coining the term ambient music with the 1978 release of Music For Airports. Yet that unconventional approach has resulted in mega hits that you might hear played in the grocery store. Using the studio as an instrument has encouraged reckless arrangements, sonic left turns, and futuristic compositional systems. From ambient soundscapes to arena rock anthems, there’s always a playfulness to the production.
It’s led to a body of work that sounds impressionistic, pieces that emphasize journeys rather than destinations. Throughout his career he’s favored blunt creativity and unconventional processes over technical skill, both in music released under his own name and as a producer. Despite a Discogs page as a long as a phone book and a career that dates back to when people actually used those, Brian Eno has always coyly avoided the title of “musician.” As explained to Lester Bangs in a 1979 interview, the non-musician label was in opposition to the “tacit belief that virtuosity was the sine qua non of music and there was no other way of approaching it.”
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