Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Mojo NOVEMBER 2022 - by David Sheppard

BRIAN ENO: FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE

The seventy-four-year-old ambient grandee ruminates on an imperilled globe.

In August of last year, Brian and brother Roger Eno accepted an invitation to perform live at Athens' Epidaurus Festival, nominally in support of their 2020 collaboration Mixing Colours. The city was melting in 45-degree heat, the surrounding hills aflame, and while the dystopian backdrop may have rendered the duo's hypnagogic aquatint instrumentals somewhat incongruous, it certainly reinforced the message behind a brace of Brian's new songs also debuted that evening: Garden Of Stars and There Were Bells. Both feature on what is officially his twenty-second solo album, and are, like everything here, predicated on feelings about the climate emergency and "our narrowing, precarious future".

This is the first album of Eno songs (more accurately, eight songs, one instrumental and an extended semi-vocal piece originally composed for a climate-referencing installation at London's Serpentine Gallery) since 2005's Another Day On Earth. And while 2016's Titanic-referencing The Ship offers a partial precedent, this is surely his most saturnine dispatch to date. While initially familiar - the music beatless, minimal and immersive - what distinguishes FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE are Eno's uncharacteristically pained, yearning vocals, his lyrics by turns questioning, censorious or plain despondent, even when banked into mellifluous harmony. Opener Who Gives A Thought sets the desolate tone with its undulating ambient synths and opaque, minor chord guitars framing Eno's portentous entreaty. His delivery, cushioned by emollient reverb, summons late-period Scott Walker as he links the cataclysmic with the infinitesimal ("Who gives a thought about the nematodes? / There isn't time these days for microscopic worms").

The initial insectoid flutters of the aforementioned Garden Of Stars usher in ever more disquieting waves of digital static as Eno contemplates the cosmos, and our planet's finite place in it, concluding, gravely, "These billion years will end", while the equally declamatory Icarus Or Blériot, an extended hubris/aviation metaphor ("Now so high, Icarus"), is framed in shimmering daubs of Leo Abrahams' processed guitar and disquieting, synthetic cricket noise. Eno's voice is balefully Walker-esque once more on There Were Bells - "All the days turn into one," he declares disconsolately, suspended amid a miasma of ominous synths - while on the empty, electric piano-brushed Sherry, he affects an even more atypical, abstract croon, his vertiginous melody almost Kurt Weill-like. The lyrics ("Last light from an old sun") could be channelling Weill's disquisition on our lonely planet ennui, Lost In The Stars, if not Eno's own, similarly themed No One Receiving, from Before And After Science.

FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is not a 'protest album', Eno insists, but, rather, a necessarily sombre meditation on a world that is "changing at a super-rapid rate... large parts of it are disappearing for ever". As such, it is as timely as it is sobering and, in places, austerely, compellingly beautiful.