Tuesday, November 26, 2013

"Here Come the Warm Jets" (Brian Eno)

I have an enormous amount of respect for Brian Eno as an artist.  If you need an example of "thinking outside the box," look to Eno.  
On second thought, don't.  
With Eno, there is no box.  Never was.  There was a rhombus covered in fluorescent lights once, but he set fire to it in the 70s.  
He's refused to be bound by any one genre or particular sound.  Yet, anytime you hear anything that he's written, recorded, or produced in the past 40 years, you can only describe it as "Eno-esque."  It's that singular, off-kilter approach to pop songcraft.  It's a synth coming in where you'd expect a drum.  A guitar that shrieks like a cat in a blender.  A piano that sounds like a nightmare come to life.  An angelic, electronic choir that blasts affirmation of life.  And sometimes all of that is within the same 4-minute song.
On the title track from his 1974 album, instruments lose their identities and intertwine in a fuzzed out fanfare that sounds like a victory song played by an army of Huns.  Or maybe a drunken lot of football fans.  
At first I wondered, is that synthesizer?  Is that guitar?  Then I realized that question was irrelevant.  It's an atmosphere.  It's a feeling.  It's a warm jet!
What's a warm jet?  
Pffft.  Irrelevant!
Whatever it is, it stirs stuff deep in your gut that makes you want to punch the air.  
Then these drums that sound like a stampede march in from all sides, carrying a faint hint of a vocal that turns into a muddy chorus of Enos, singing about...  Um.
Something about being on your knees?  Something about saints?
Whatever he's singing, it sounds like revolution and triumph.
Sounds, sounds, sounds.
That's Eno.





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