Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Uncut DECEMBER 2023 - by Damien Love

BRYAN FERRY: MAMOUNA (DELUXE EDITION)

One of the great mood albums

Caught in the search for perfection, paralysed in the studio by dense multi-track madness, Bryan Ferry spent six years making the album released as Mamouna in 1994 and, lacking any stand-out, Slave To Love-sized killer singles, it failed to set the world alight. Three decades on, however, it's the sheer deep-focus cohesion - how everything flows, sighs and pulses together as one neon twilight - that makes this one of the great mood albums; the record where Ferry, never more worldly and world-weary, honed his themes of hopeless love and itching, lonely longing to their murmuring essences, while taking the twitching implications of the post-Avalon sound to its limit. A scattered mini-Roxy reunion doesn't hurt, with Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay on separate tracks, and Eno hovering over everything sprinkling skewed "sonic awareness".

EXTRAS: This majestic expanded edition includes Horoscope, the aborted album that is Mamouna's shadow: four Mamouna tracks in earlier guises; two more (Loop Di Li and Midnight Train) that wouldn't be completed until 2014's Avonmore; a shimmery reworking of Roxy's eternal Mother Of Pearl; and one lost classic, Raga, a lamentation with Remain In Light overtones. A third disc showcases largely instrumental sketches for Mamouna tracks.