Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Classic Rock NOVEMBER 2022 - by Stephen Dalton

BRIAN ENO: FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE

Ambient godfather makes rare vocal album full of warm emotion and apocalyptic angst.

Voice maturing like fine cheese, the veteran egghead professor of conceptual art-pop shows off his crooning skills for the first time in seventeen years on his latest solo album. As the title suggests, ForeverAndEverNoMore finds the seventy-four-year-old Eno musing on final things, chiefly the potential end of humankind due to climate catastrophe, while attempting to harness music's full-blooded emotional power to help avert disaster. There Were Bells and Garden Of Stars are vintage late-period Eno, lush electro-pastoral hymnals layered with birdsong, breathy sighs and Gregorian chant-like vocals.

Perhaps the most surprising highlights here are some of the most conventionally song-like solo pieces Eno has ever produced: Sherry is a wistful, jazzy ballad threaded with luminous Floydian guitar lines and These Small Noises a gorgeous late-night lullaby of electric piano ripples and cooing female voices. A shimmering miasma of glitchy textures and Auto-Tuned vocalese, the album's largely instrumental finale Making Gardens Out Of Silence could almost be a twenty-first-century update of those seminal ambient sound paintings on Bowie's "Heroes", which is a pretty high bar. Behind all the autumnal rumination and elder-statesmen tastefulness, thankfully, Eno's experimental ethos endures.