Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brian Eno Available Now
This is Brian Eno’s Masterpiece as well as a personal favorite of yours truly.
On the right pressing, this is a twisted pop Big Speaker Demo Disc like nothing you have ever heard.
If you have a big speaker and the kind of high quality playback that is capable of unraveling the most complicated studio creations, with all the weight and power of live music at practically live levels, this is the record that will make all your audio effort and expense worthwhile.
That’s the kind of stereo I’ve been working on for forty fifty years and this album just plain KILLS over here.
Art Rock
That being said, it may not be the kind of thing most music loving audiophiles will be able to make sense of if they have no history with this kind of arty rock from the 70s. I grew up on Roxy Music, 10cc, Eno, The Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Ambrosia, Supertramp, Yes and the like, bands that wanted to play rock music but felt shackled by the chains of the conventional pop song.
This was and still is my favorite kind of music. Experts who study these things say that the music you discover between the ages of 17 and 23 stays with you for your entire life. For me that’s the music I fell in love from 1971 to 1977. I was 20 when this album came out.
When it comes to the genre, I put this album right at the top of the heap, along with several other landmark albums from the period: More Songs About Buildings and Food, Siren, The Original Soundtrack, Crisis? What Crisis?, Ambrosia’s first two releases, The Yes Album, 801 Live, A New World Order and plenty of others, many more than I have room to describe here.
It should be noted that most of these album don’t sell all that well. We do shootouts for them anyway, partly in the hopes that at least some of our more adventurous customers will get turned on to this music and have their lives changed in the same way mine was.
One difference I could be forgiven for pointing to in this regard is that I had available to me random copies of unknown quality, unlike our customers who get offered nothing but great sounding pressings.
Mystery Reviewer’s Much More Insightful Commentary
Brian Eno’s sophomore solo outing is a grab bag of freaky, science-fiction-dipped confections. Filled with a battery of innovative, unsettling effects, the album is darker and more complex than Here Come The Warm Jets. He shows an increasing willingness to experiment with texture, as on “The Great Pretender,” whose whirling, oozing keyboard line and synthesized vocals approximate delirium tremens or a hatching hive of maggots, or on “Put A Straw Under Baby,” which features the Portsmouth Sinfonia, whose members have no knowledge of their instruments.
Yet Eno’s grasp of melody and songcraft is everywhere: on the bouncing, absurdist/philosophical “Burning Airlines (Give You So Much More),” and on straight-out rockers, like the deliciously intense “Third Uncle” (which is propelled by the churning guitar of Roxy Music’s Phil Manzenera, and is, arguably, the album’s highlight).
Eno’s tunes are even more otherwordly and warped than his glam cohort David Bowie, making use of the full palette of bizarro synthesizer effects and creepy-cheeky postures. The songs, however, are as inventive and appealing as their treatments, and make for Eno’s most solid–and experimental–pop album. This LP holds up magnificently, even years on in the artist’s brilliant career.
AMG Review
Eno’s richly layered arrangements juxtapose very different treated sounds, yet they blend and flow together perfectly, hinting at the directions his work would soon take with the seamless sound paintings of Another Green World. Although not quite as enthusiastic as Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain is made accessible through Eno’s mastery of pop song structure, a form he would soon transcend and largely discard.
Further Reading