Customer Reviews

Another Green World

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4 star:		(12)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

One my favorite Eno albums, "Another Green World" shows him already on the path to ambient music with about 1/3 of the album devoted to instrumental pieces. In many respects, it's an extension of the work he did on his first two solo albums but the emphasis here is on the more melodic side of things. With Roxy Music's "Stranded" and "Avalon", one of the more atmospheric albums put out by a former member of the band.

The sound is spectacular although you won't hear a huge improvement. Most of the improvements are subtle; it's akin to seeing someone after a facial vs. a facelift. You know that something's different but can't pin it down. The depth of the recording and actual atmosphere of the studio are more readily apparent as are more sonic details.

The damaged track "Everything Merges with the Night" has been repaired in all later editions of this terrific album. Other things that might have improved this set include a booklet with notes on the production of the album, bonus tracks with outtakes (I keep waiting for the singles that Eno released on CD invain it seems) or rough mixes of the album. While I appreciate that Eno wants the album presented as it originally was, it's a pity that we don't know more about the making of the album.

Overall a terrific re-release even. I just wish that it had been packaged with more details about the making of the album.

In an interview ten years after the release of his acknowledged 1975 masterpiece ANOTHER GREEN WORLD, Brian Eno said, "I want the music to be as much as possible a continuous condition of the environment...in the same way as a painting is." This goes a long way toward explaining Eno's approach to music, where tone and texture take precedence over lyrics and melody. These are not so much songs as they are ambient sound paintings. Even on songs like "I'll Come Running", which seems to follow a conventional song structure, there is an ethereal beauty about it.

Even on the songs where Eno includes lyrics, they seem to be there not so much for meaning, but for the images they conjure. Consider these lines from "St. Elmo's Fire": "Then we rested in the desert/ Where the bones were white as teeth, sir/ And we saw St. Elmo's Fire / Splitting ions in the ether." In fact, in the Lyrics to "Sky Saw," Eno seems to be saying the words really aren't that important since most people don't pay any attention to them: " All the clouds turn to words / All the words float in sequence / No one knows what they mean / Everyone just ignores them." Besides, only five of the tracks include vocals; the remainder are instrumentals.

Several tracks are less than two minutes ("Over Fire Island," "Little Fishes" and the title track), but the longest track--the vocal "Everything Merges with the Night"--is just barely over four minutes. While the opening track ("Sky Saw") is a gritty guitar-driven song, the rest of the album has a gentle, lush quality. Eno is joined on some tracks by John Cale, Phil Collins and Robert Fripp, as well as a handful of other musicians. If you're new to the music to Brian Eno, this is the place to start. ESSENTIAL

I was born in 1971, so, with the exception of receiving Sabbath's "Paranoid" on cassette when I was about 9, my exposure to important music from the 70's was highly limited. I lived under the false assumtion for many years that the best music the 70's had to offer was pre-punk classic rock. However, I have been voraciously consuming music from the 1970s onward for the last 5+ years and I fell face forward over Brian Eno.

Finding Eno was like finding a diamond in your toilet: completely unexpected and unpleasant to get to. In my opinion, this is the pinnacle of Eno's pre-ambient works (which I also appreciate highly). Every song is lovely, haunting, and brilliant. From the opening note to the last note, I am continually in awe. As with all trancendent music, Another Green World is not limited by the period in which it was recorded and it is still fresh and breathtaking 30 years later.

I use the descriptor "mind-blowing" for only a few musical works. Another Green World is on this very short list, along with Iggy & the Stooges' "Raw Power," Pixies' "Come on Pilgrim/Surfer Rosa," My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless," and Sigur Ros' "()."

... because Brian Eno has long been a hero of mine, and Another Green World is easily his most pathbreaking release--one of the most original and adventurous recordings ever. I still recall my first experience listening to this. A popular radio station where I was then living (Athens, Ga.) played a new album every weeknight at midnight. That particular night I was tuned in and reading a fantasy novel, one of the late Roger Zelazny's AMBER novels ("Sign of the Unicorn," I think). The music provided such a perfect soundtrack for what I was reading it was as if the two belonged together.

Even though it's two and a half decades later, I still go back to Another Green World several times a month.

Eno, of course, is simultaneously composer and experimenter with sound, cyberneticist and systems thinker, and commentator on life (with a Diary that is utterly unique). That sort of description would ring pretentious with anyone else, but Eno has just been being himself all these years, an artist using technology to make music in a different way. He once told everyone "I'm not a musician," meaning that he wasn't a trained technical virtuoso--and therefore willing to take chances he probably wouldn't have taken had he "known better."

Another Green World is a product of this mindset, a recording both magical and beautiful, holding up under time extremely well, considering that the first British edition came out almost 25 years ago! Eno's pleasant singing highlights tracks such as "I'll Come Running," "Golden Hours" and "Everything Merges With the Night." His lyrics sometimes have a touch of the romantic and sometimes of the wistful. Others tracks are instrumentals, ambient in the original sense Eno first used that term: quiet, spare, soundscapes where mood and image are foremost, and very simple arranging seems to generate amazing richness and complexity: "In Dark Trees," "The Big Ship," "Becalmed" and "Somber Reptiles." "Sky Saw," the opening track, and "Spirits Drifting," the closer, function like bookends. The first was described by Charley Walters in his classic 1976 review of the original album in ROLLING STONE as a kind of bridge between the song-oriented tracks and the more ambient ones: it starts as an instrumental featuring an eerie but compelling sequence from John Cale's "weeping viola," then turns into a vocal piece. Eno's treated guitar (curiously labeled a "snake guitar") sounds very much like a saw--somewhere in the sky. But then again, all the *titles* on this CD perfectly capture the mood of the piece. "Spirits Drifting," finally, is a gentle yet hypnotic exercise in which there is the aural equivalent of something moving about the room but in no definite direction; the sound and effect stays with you long after the piece ends. This seems to have been Eno's intent, to offer us fragments of images painted in sound instead of color that could have begun long before we hear them coming through the speakers, and could go on indefinitely after the piece fades out--maybe forever.

Echoes of Another Green World and other early Eno releases are now everywhere: on far better known U2 releases which Eno produced (or co-produced), on the multitude of 90s collections of so-called ambient techno (e.g., early Aphex Twin), and gazillions of others. Many of these are interesting in their own right but none come close to topping Eno's achievement here.

Another Green World is a truly timeless masterpiece, and far more important in the scheme of things than most folks know. If you've got all the U2 CDs (since The Unforgettable Fire, anyway) and want to find out where the sonic depth and imagination of those recordings came from, go back to Brian Eno and start here. Not to take anything from U2, but Eno's efforts have enhanced their sound beyond measure. Unfortunately I can only give this five stars. If Amazon.com allowed, I'd give it 20. It's that worthwhile.

Everything Eno touches turns into Eno, including Phil Collins. Yes indeed, Phil Collins plays drums on this album, which also features Robert Fripp, Phil Manzenera, John Cale and a host of other avant-pop musicians from the mid-70s. This album was a daring step for Brian Eno who had made his reputation as the transvestite synth player for Roxy Music and who went on to produce art-pop albums like HERE COME THE WARM JETS and TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN BY STRATEGY. Those odd albums, with their cryptic surrealist lyrics (check out "Baby's On Fire" and "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch") and tongue in cheek music performances that concealed their own innovative experimentation, barely hinted at the beauty and sublime that was to emerge on ANOTHER GREEN WORLD. Part ambient, part pop, part musical tone poems, this is the album that started Eno off on his journey towards the nearly invisible (re: his Ambient albums) and the avant-garde (check out his out-of-print Obscure Music series).

It was little known to the general public that Brian Eno had been the president of his student union back in school and he had sponsored many musical events which is where he made many of his contacts some of which may or may not have included Gavin Byers, Harold Budd, Bryan Ferry, Michael Nyman, John Cage, etc. Many of these musicians were to be collaborators with Eno from the late 70's onwards, bringing a more obscure, more poetic, more silent and haunting sound. But here on GREEN WORLD, Eno is just on the cusp of his transformation.

"St. Elmo's Fire" is an Eno-masterpiece and features a sublime guitar solo from Robert Fripp. "Golden Hours" features John Cale's Velvet Underground Viola and instrumental tracks like "Sombre Reptiles" is a perfect example of the creation of an Eno-landscape in studio sound that was to reach it's perfection in Ambient 4: ON LAND several years later.

This was my first introduction to Eno and remains a favorite of mine. He was one year away from turning David Bowie into Eno (re: Low) and turning Devo into Eno, and five years away from turning the Talking Heads into Eno (re: Remain in Light) and ten years away from turning U2 into Eno (re: The Joshua Tree). Here he is Eno turning himself into Eno.

This is simply a beautiful album. It is the album's cover art set to music. The music is sparse, sometimes minimalist, and also lush and gorgeous; a true paradox.

The song titles, while odd (Sombre Reptiles), fit neatly with the music. The album's closing numbers, "Spirits Drifting" and "Everything Merges with the Night" are as beautiful as anything I have ever heard.

[My pet peeve and the only thing I don't like about the album is the lyric, "I'll come runnning to tie your shoe." It's jarring and the only thing that seems out of place on the album, perhaps a holdover from his unfortunate, pretentious "baby's on fire" lyrical days.]

Looking back, this can be seen as his transition into "ambient" music. I was intrigued at the time (the early eighties) but abandoned ship. It's interesting to see how he began a new category of music.

As others have mentioned, after you hear this you will better understand "The Unforgettable Fire." Eno improved U2 immeasurably. He also did wonders for Talking Heads.

This is simply a must have for any record collection.

Very rarely do transitional albums go on to be an artist's definitive work. This is the case with "Another Green World." Coming after "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" (another masterpiece) and before "Before and After Science", "Another Green World" is the hybrid between those two albums that you'd expect, the exception being that "Another Green World" is arguably better than the both of them. Joined by fellow genius John Cale (who played viola) and genius at that time Phil Collins (percussion on three tracks) Brian Eno created a classicist pop art album that went on to be an influential and definitive reference point for countless musicians that came in it's wake. The ambient beauty's marriage with the pop sensibilities of this album's immediate predecessors, and their predecessor, his work with Roxy Music, is at times sinful in it's simplicity and wonder. It lets you know how Eve must have felt when she first saw the apple in the Garden of Eden. The melodies lull you toward them while keeping their distance at the same time. If you want to find something this simple but yet so excellent you'd have to scour through prime-John Cale or Kraftwerk, and even then you'd find nothing that was as good or better.

I'm not a huge fan of Brian Eno or ambient music in general, but this 1975 post-Roxy Music album is timeless listening. Unlike most music labeled "progressive" in the same timeframe, there is no virtuoso wanking, no epic song lengths, and a refreshing lack of pretention. Eno keeps it straightforward, with tracks averaging around 3 minutes in length. And yet, this is without question innovative material for its time and has aged surprisingly well in the face of rapid technological progress--not something you can say for most albums that rely so heavily on electronics (percussion, keyboards, etc.).

The ensemble is ace. Robert Fripp is here on electric guitar; Phil Collins (long prior his boring "adult-contemporary" years) contributes percussion to several tracks; and John Cale has a mesmerizing viola spot on opener Sky Saw. Of special note here is Fripp demonstrating, detractors aside, that he can show plenty of emotion in his playing. St. Elmo's Fire has one of the greatest, most heartfelt guitar solos I've ever heard by ANYONE ("...and we saw St. Elmo's Fire splitting ions in the ether"), and it totally makes the song. He also contributes nicely to Golden Hours and I'll Come Running (too bad the rest of the song isn't much to write home about--the repeated "I'll come running to tie your shoes" line doesn't work for me). Eno's flat voice isn't ideally suited to singing, but it works for the soft nature of the material, and carries melody well enough. His lyrics are vaguely impressionistic snippets, similar to previous album Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy but less willfully strange and more genuine and emotional.

Then there's the ambient material which makes up three-quarters of the album, which I'm more ambivalent about. None of it is BAD, per se, but some pieces are far better than others. The most notable is easily The Big Ship, which builds and builds to a beautifully affecting climax before drifting away. Sombre Reptiles and In Dark Trees are also excellent, moody and dark as their titles suggest. Anyway, none of the experiments are overlong or skip-worthy, but I tend to prefer the art-pop songs, which are a clear inspiration for bands like the Talking Heads, Joy Division, David Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy," and Devo, many of whom later worked with Eno himself.

This is an essential purchase for anyone interested in '70s art rock, electronic music, ambient etc. If you don't have them already, I also highly reccommend Bowie's Low and the David Byrne/Eno collaboration My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts; the former has generally better singing, is a little edgier, and also successfully couples accessible pop tracks with Eno-produced ambient pieces; while the latter is more experimental and weird, combining Byrne's love of African music and Eno's experimental side to create a genuine masterwork. Get 'em all.

Brian Eno's solo material is an incredibly mercurial mix of styles - some albums are made up entirely of songs, some are more experimental and ambient, some are unclassifiable. This recording, originally released in 1975, is a nice mixture, giving the listener a gentle drift into Eno's world.

His releases have always been about much more than just the audio element - and I'm not referring to cover art, although some great examples of visual arts have graced his album jackets, and have been included as inserts as well. There is a visual quality to his music that is such an integral part of the sound that its presence is that of a powerful, almost subliminal force that is felt indirectly rather than in a more overt manner. The mood conveyed by the various pieces on this recording is tangible and real. With some artists, this effect is an illusion - with Brian Eno, it's a reality. His arrangements, while at times giving the impression that they are thrown together piecemeal, anyone who listens carefully to this music will realize quickly that this is far from the case - a great deal of meticulous care has gone into the works represented here (as well as all of his other albums), and the effect of the music upon the listener is deep and premeditated. This is not to say that this music is void of emotion, meaning and even humor - these and many other rewards fill his work.

Eno performs most of the music on this disc - with some help from several very respected friends, such as Robert Fripp, Phil Collins, Percy Jones, and John Cale. The track `St. Elmo's fire' contains one of (in my opinion) Robert Fripp's most beautiful guitar solos - it starts right after the line `...and we saw St. Elmo's fire spitting ions in the ether', wonderfully illustrating the lyric. Fripp is also credited with `restrained lead guitar' on `I'll come running', and turns in a really nice performance on `Golden hours' as well - the latter played in a more staccato style, as opposed to his usual sustained playing. Eno tailors the sounds of the various instruments to work them into the canvas of each selection - another example of the `visual' aspects of his art. He's a master at this - and on this, his third album, it's apparent that his career was going to be a brilliant one.

There are several instrumentals included here, and they're great examples of Eno's creativity and imagination. Each one is imbued with its own distinct personality, and the images called up are striking and memorable. The songs have clever lyrics - oft-times mildly humorous, poking a bit of fun at the perceived elitism of `artsy' composers and musicians - but the lyrics are just another facet of the whole presentation, and very often the vocals could easily be experienced as another instrument, rather than the primary carrier of meaning in the song. For example, in the first track, `Sky saw', he sings `All the clouds turn to words, all the words float in sequence - no one knows what they mean, everyone just ignores them', followed by several lines of apparent nonsense to make his point even further.

Although the album has its `rock' moments, the overall mood is one of gentle, calm observation and experience - returning to the visual art metaphor, imagine strolling leisurely through an art gallery, taking in each painting at your own pace, undisturbed by the world outside or any issues or commitments that might be weighing on your mind. That's the best way to enjoy Eno's music - give yourself the time and space to be absorbed in it. It's a rewarding experience - it was that way in 1975, when I first heard this album, and each time I return to it, I find that to still be the case.

The best Eno CD's are his exquistely popcrafted Taking Tiger Mountain and this even more exquisite, though less fun, one. Another Green World cleans up the graduate school music lab that was Tiger Mountain but I miss the mess, well ...sometimes. The energies are so diverse on Tiger Mountain while on Green World there is less overall energy because there are fewer ideas at work. The songs on Another Green World have been worked on and honed and focused into more completely realized songs and the CD does deserve its reputation. No other music like either album exists anywhere else,neither the frantic and witty pop battle plan of Tiger nor the conceptual though earthy and melodic compositions of Green World can be found but in the Eno archive. Just depends on what kind of mood you are in when you go to the CD pile. More often than not I am in the mood for the wilder Tiger and its forever undisclosed variety of strategies. Another Green World however will please and impress your professional music listeners ears more though. For your more serious lofty afternoons Green World. For your anarchists den Tiger Mountain. Own both.