Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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The Scotsman OCTOBER 13, 2022 - by Fiona Shepherd

BRIAN ENO: FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE

Brian Eno's first vocal album since 2005 is a meditation on precarious times, writes Fiona Shepherd

Eno speaks! Or rather sings... While his erstwhile Roxy Music bandmates celebrate their golden jubilee with a moody tour of their back pages, Brian Eno is, as per, in another sonic world, considering this increasingly fragile one. As such, his twenty-second solo album requires some lyrics to express his response to the climate crisis. He characterises his first vocal album since 2005's Another Day On Earth as "landscapes, but this time with humans in them".

Foreverandevernomore is a meditation on precarious times, the need to change not just our thinking around the planet but, perhaps more effectively, our feelings towards it. In that context, the mantra-like album title sounds a warning note - we cannot go on living as if Earth is infinite.

This is no heavy lecture but a balanced sonic ecosystem, reconciling soothing soundscapes with lyrical laments for the environment. Eno offers up the melancholic prayer Who Gives A Thought with mellow, soulful vocals over a beatific digital swirl. We Let It In starts with ominous breathing, before contrasting Eno's mournful baritone with his daughter Darla's floating soprano. He delivers a monastic plainsong for one on Garden Of Stars and asks "who are we?" on the ambient torch song Icarus Or Blériot - are we flying too close to the sun or stepping out in faith?

The shimmering, simmering Inclusion is the album's one instrumental interlude, followed by one of the most affecting tracks. There Were Bells, created with his brother Roger, outlines an all-too-familiar vision of planetary paradise becoming apocalyptic hell with Eno lamenting "there were those who ran away, there were those who had to stay... in the end they all went the same way". He delivers this last elegiac observation in an unresolved minor key.

Most of the album tracks weigh in around the four-to-five minute mark, almost pop proportions, but closing odyssey Making Gardens Out Of Silence is eight minutes of ringing ambience with an autotuned Darla drifting in and out as the music starts to resemble a neo-classical pastoral.