If Eno is involved, we can expect some oddball invention and unusual sounds, at the very least. And this one has some pretty damn good songs on it as well. As is also usual with Eno, there’s a whole gang of contributors, including Phil Collins and Robert Fripp, his old Roxy Music oppo Phil Manzanera, Dave Mattacks from Fairport Convention, Andy Fraser from Free, and a host of German contributors, because this album is loosely connected to the Iggy ‘n’ David Berlin Adventure.
It begins in a fairly boppy mode, sounding much like Roxy Music-era Eno before going into the jaunty track Backwater, a kind of electronic sea shanty, like something Syd Barrett might have gone into had he not fallen apart. The lyrics start quite Barrett-esque
“Oh we're floating in the coastal waters
You and me and the porter's daughters
Ooh what to do not a sausage to do
And the shorter of the porter's daughters
Dips her hand in the deadly waters
Ooh what to do in a tiny canoe “
before becoming more sleek in the final verse “But if you study the logistics, and heuristics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line”, delivered rapid-fire like a precursor to rap (and apparently Eno would invent the lyrics on the spot, so quite like free-styling, in fact).
It moves through the track King’s Lead Hat which sounds really like a Talking Heads track. And then somebody points out that the “King’s Lead Hat” is an anagram of “Talking Heads” and that this was essentially Eno’s audition piece to produce Talking Heads, which he does for their next three albums. Eno even manages a fair David Byrne impression in his vocals.
Here He Comes is a slower piece to start Side Two, sounding not unlike Save The Last Dance For Me (The Drifters). As Side Two progresses through to the sublimely sparse and haunting Julie With, which returns to Backwater’s boat motif, but unlike the bouncy and absurdist voyage described there, this is a wistful musing on the figure of Julie “No wind disturbs our colored sail, the radio is silent, so are we. Julie's head is on her arm, her fingers brush the surface of the sea”. As with the “porter’s shorter daughter”, we have a woman dipping her hand in the sea, but this is more of a languid pose than the “poison water” of before. As with Costello’s Watching The Detectives, this can be read with more sinister intent. Is the narrator enjoying a peaceful romantic day with Julie, or is he about to dispose of her corpse? Julie, after all, doesn’t move in the song but lies limp. The lyric closes with “Now I wonder if we'll be seen here, or if time has left us all alone. The still sea is darker than before”
And from there, Eno moves the album into gradually more and more ambient areas, into calmer waters if you will, with By This River, then Through Hollow Lands, finishing with the sparse Spider And I, with the narrator and “the spider” sat in “our world of silence” and, to continue the boating metaphor, “We dream of a ship that sails away, a thousand miles away”. Is "The Spider" a reference to Bowie (A Spider from Mars)?
Of all of the Eno albums so far, I think this is probably my favourite, forming a nice balance between the inventiveness of Warm Jets and the melodiousness of Another Green World, and one of the most coherent in terms of an underlying theme and a musical journey.
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