Released - September 1975
Genre - Art Rock
Producer - Brian Eno & Rhett Davies
Selected Personnel - Brian Eno (Vocals/Synthesiser/Guitar/Bass/Piano/Percussion/Sound Effects/Organ); John Cale (Viola); Phil Collins (Drums/Percussion); Robert Fripp (Guitar); Percy Jones (Bass); Roderick Melvin (Piano); Paul Rudolph (Bass/Guitar); Brian Turrington (Bass/Piano)
Standout Track - The Big Ship
Another Green World is markedly different to all of Brian Eno's other "conventional" art rock albums (meaning his records consisting of slightly more convetional song structures rather than consisting principally of ambient compositions - it'd be difficult to describe any Eno album as being truly "conventional") in that it manages to merge both his approaches to making music but never quite strikes a comfortable balance between the two - it's an album it took me a long time to love due to the fact that there doesn't feel like there's a satisfying symbiosis between the lyrical songs and the more imagistic pieces, and as such very much feels like a mixed bag of disparate ideas, some of which work and some of which don't. But for the transitional phase Eno was going through, gradually losing interest in traditional rock music and becoming more fascinated with ambient sonic textures thanks to his experimenting on records like (No Pussyfooting) and Discreet Music, it's perhaps a perfect snapshot of his mind at the time, busily painting with sound and with ideas to try and express something, and sometimes falling short but never failing to be a valiant experiment.
As I said in my review of Discreet Music, to my knowledge, although that record was released after Another Green World, by the time he came to start working on this album he had already been experimenting extensively within the territory of what he would eventually codify as ambient music, and this shift in his musical sensibilities I think has a huge importance in appreciating this record. Rather than going into a recording studio with a collection of songs to work on, this time Eno went in with nothing other than a selection of guest musicians (including his previous collaborator Robert Fripp, Velvet Underground violist John Cale and Genesis drummer Phil Collins, plus new producer Rhett Davies who would go on to be a frequent collaborator with both Eno and his former Roxy Music cohort Bryan Ferry) with the intention of creating new material from scratch in the studio. Even those guest musicians were to be kept in limited roles, with Eno playing the vast majority of the instruments on the album. This time Eno's aim wasn't to create a collection of actual songs, and only five of the fourteen compositions that would make up the album would actually involve vocal melodies. Rather, his aim was just to experiment with textures, soundscapes and atmospheres to create brief snapshots and images through music to convey a particular idea.
It's a long way from the truly ambient material of his work in the later 70s, given that most of the instrumental pieces on Another Green World are still driven by some form of melody or rhythm, however slight, but this album is one of the finest at conveying just how perfectly Eno could communicate a mood or an emotion through a particular treatment of a certain sound. While they had been used sporadically on his previous solo album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), this was the first album that would be composed almost entirely via the use of Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards he devised with artist Peter Schmidt (who provided the album's cover art, detail from his painting After Raphael). It would become key to Eno's working methods, and would come to be adopted by artists he collaborated with such as David Bowie, and consisted of a deck of cards each posing a "worthwhile dilemma," a way of forcing a creative mind into a lateral position in order to find unexpected ways of resolving a creative issue. Instructions such as "Honour thy mistake as a hidden intention" or "Discover your formulas and then abandon them" forced Eno into the kind of weird, unexpected sonic territories he forges into here. In fact, the lyrical songs are among the weakest cuts on the album.
"Sky Saw" is the best of the conventional songs, though its vocal melody is one of the less impressive parts of it, second to the scraping of Cale's viola and the emotive droning of Eno's "snake guitar," a guitar with particular distortions and treatments applied to it which created a sound that Eno claimed only Mike Oldfield also knew how to create. It's a wonderful slice of dark, atmospheric rock, but some of the other melodic pieces like "St. Elmo's Fire" are pretty uninspiring (Fripp's blistering guitar solo aside), while "I'll Come Running" is one of the blandest and most tedious songs Eno ever recorded.
But in its atmospheric instrumental pieces the album really comes alive. "In Dark Trees," with its clattering, metallic percussion and wheezing synths, is gloriously creepy, and "The Big Ship," on which Eno plays all instruments himself, is an incredibly cathartic and inspiring piece, one where the growing intensity and grandeur of the swathes of synth make the whole piece slowly ascend skywards to one of Eno's most affecting climaxes. "The Big Ship" just about takes the place of this album's finest track, but there's a double whammy of incredibly powerful ambient pieces in the second half that almost match it in the form of "Becalmed" followed by "Zawinul/Lava." Far more placid and glacial than "The Big Ship," they always feel like a conjoined pair to me in that they both explore the empty space between the oases created by chiming chords played on synth or keyboards, but while one manages to extend and explore that space in a way that feels calming and transcendental ("Zawinul/Lava"), the other ("Becalmed") explores the same musical territory in what always feels to me like a tone of despair and isolation. It's one of Eno's greatest masterclasses in how he can take similar musical ingredients and treat them in different ways to create an entirely different tone and mood.
Much of the rest of the album varies from the decent to the wholly forgettable, and I'd have trouble whole-heartedly recommending Another Green World as an album that's 100% killer. But for precisely that reason it fulfils Eno's ambitions for it as a record totally - it finds precise, imagistic ways of expressing the spaces within his mind that he wanted to explore, and that means moving through a variety of textures and timbres regardless of how musically compelling they may be. Sadly, it essentially marked the end of Eno as a commercial artist and failed to chart well compared to his previous solo albums. But this was largely due to his own decision to move in that direction, to explore the sonic and emotional qualities of music itself rather than worry about writing songs that would sell well. It's come to be regarded as a classic album and a hugely significant one for music as a whole, and it also marks the shift after which Eno would cease to think of himself as a "solo artist" in any traditional sense. He would release one more conventional-ish solo album in 1977, Before And After Science, but the next few years would largely see him working either as a collaborator for other more mainstream artists, or experimenting in sonic compositions. Many of Eno's greatest innovations and achievements were still to come, though.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Brian Eno.
1. Sky Saw
2. Over Fire Island
3. St. Elmo's Fire
4. In Dark Trees
5. The Big Ship
6. I'll Come Running
7. Another Green World
8. Sombre Reptiles
9. Little Fishes
10. Golden Hours
11. Becalmed
12. Zawinul/Lava
13. Everything Merges With The Night
14. Spirits Drifting
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