"Brian Eno? Isn't he that guy who invented 'ambient music'?"
Well....yeah, I guess.
"Isn't he that bald guy who produced U2 and fucking Coldplay?"
Well....yeah, guilty as charged...BUT he also made four outstanding albums of art rock back in the seventies that he, quite frankly, just doesn't get enough love for.
While all the pseuds and hipsters wax poetic about 'Discreet Music' and 'Music For Airports', I'm diggin' his non-ambient work with Robert Fripp, his pre-Talking Heads Talking Heads-isms and his bold attempt to find a genuine use for Phil Collins (which he DOES, with aplomb).
I mean, I ask you, LOOK at the dude! Does he look like some po-faced chinstroking pseudo-intellectual? in THAT jacket??*
No, when Eno left Roxy Music in 1973, taking all their mojo with him, he did what people didn't really expect him to do, considering he was the 'non-musician' (his words) and resident brain box of the band...he made an absolutely KILLER solo album that, in MY humble opinion, totally outshines anything Roxy Music EVER did.
So, in order to edumacate youse heathen scum, I'll be posting up the first four Eno 'vocal' albums here over the course of the week, possibly followed by a li'l treat in the shape of an 'odds and ends' comp of singles, radio session tracks and whatnot, if you're all good li'l ladies 'n' germs.
Here Come The Warm Jets was something that I don't think anyone was expecting. Despite Eno's rep as a ladies man and top shagger, he was commonly regarded as an arty oddball who made bleepy-bloopy noises, and so any kind of solo album he made would probably be 'difficult'. '...Jets' totally blows that notion out of the water by being chock-full of arty funk, off-kilter pop-rock and possibly Robert Fripp's finest recorded guitar solo...
'Baby's On Fire' was actually the first thing Eno wrote for this record and the damn thing sounds fresh as a daisy today. Minimal, artful loping groove, odd, camply-arch lyrics and vocal and THAT solo. It's a total WINNER, as is the entire record. A stone-cold classic. Oh, and for lovers of bleepy-bloopy Eno, check out the end of the exceptionally English 'Dead Finks Tell No Tales'. Sounds like a malfunctioning Cylon.
*actually, he looks totally like Elrond
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