Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Mojo MAY 2015 - by David Sheppard

BRIAN ENO: THE SHIP

Dystopian ambient song forms, with lyrics inspired by WWI and Titanic tragedies.

Initially, Eno's first solo album since 2012's art installation/ambient collection Lux feels like its close cousin - the sprawling opening (title) track commencing with familiarly tremulous, slow-motion synths inexorably rising and falling, oscillating between exquisite consonance and transient dissonance. Things change with the belated entry of Eno's vocoder vocal, pitched down to an unearthly basso profundo, his ominous narrative awash with oceanic metaphor ("The sail is down / The wind is gone") - the decelerated, portentous flipside to Before And After Science's blissfully adrift Julie With... The ensuing three-movement Fickle Sun suite heaves through yet darker synthetic soundscapes, with Eno and, sporadically, Peter Serafinowicz delivering disconsolate, Great War-referencing lyrics (created by feeding in relevant text references to something called a Markov Chain Generator), while the contrasting finale delivers redemptive relief in the shape of Lou Reed's I'm Set Free, rendered as a gracefully soaring, multi-harmony hymnal.