The forensic pop-visions of Brian Eno frequently feel dredged from places alien to human emotion. How, his music seems to ask, can the vapid and random flutterings of the heart compare with technology’s unblinking perfection?
For such reasons, Eno’s first album of five years, strikes a curiously retrograde note. Rather than hawking a post-futurist manifesto or reassembling random segments of noise for your conceptual pleasure, it is a conglomeration of fragile, quite sweet, pop songs. Do not adjust your hard-drive: Brian Eno has reconnected with his flesh-and-blood self.
Or so Eno, suddenly blokey and earthbound, has been insisting to anyone who will listen. In reality, Another Day On Earth is a frequently lustreless excursion – a suite of glum, synth-swaddled ballads, delivered by Eno in a spectral whisper.
When the conceit comes off, as on opener ‘This’, the results are at once underwhelming and affecting. Recasting himself as a brittle crooner, Eno flits around the corners of the song, a shadowy and introspective presence.
Elsewhere, predictable lapses into professorial ambient-pop dominate. Through the ‘70s and ‘80s, Eno framed the blue-print for immersive dance music; on the evidence of Another Day, he’s in no rush to let us forget it.
Dusky and furtive, this is a record of occasional pleasures adrift in an ocean of mediocrity. By the end Eno proves himself all too human.