I remember the title track for this being used for the BBC arts programme Arena, which made me think that it was a later album – early Eighties perhaps. Coincidentally, one of the presenters for Arena, Alan Yentob, has recently died as I’m listening to this. And it seems a fitting tribute to him in some ways, with its avant-garde nature.
Eno moves more towards ambient and electronica here, although there are a few tracks with lyrics and one, I’ll Come Running, is the most poppy. Otherwise this album consists mainly of little gems of delicate ambient sounds, especially on the second side where tracks like Becalmed and Zawinul/Lava are minimalist in the extreme. Even the track with lyrics that follows these, Everything Merges With The Night, is simple. But it works.
Unusually for music of this nature, the tracks are relatively short (Another Green Day itself is a mere 1 minute 40 seconds), but in some ways it feels like it could be lengthy Tangerine Dream or Can track broken into smaller movements. Robert Fripp, John Cale, and Phil Collins all have cameos on the album, and Eno gets up to his usual arty shenanigans with both unusual ways of playing the instruments and unusual post-production enhancements, so the album credits have references to things like “snake guitar”, “desert guitars”, “spasmodic percussion”, “uncertain piano” and “electric elements and unnatural sounds”. This means that there are sounds that are like nothing that has gone before, but to a modern ear are not enormously weird.
This is another album that I had back in my university days which I had assumed was indicative of Eno’s sound. Not compared to what has gone before, it isn’t, but I think it shows where he’s moving towards. I liked it back then, but it feels like I appreciate it more now; maybe it’s having better quality sound now than a cheap tape in a cheap tape recorder, maybe some of it is maturity of sensibilities, who can say. But I liked it.
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