Album Review: The Ship

Does Brian Eno ever sleep? The composer, producer, singer, visual artist and self-described “non-musician” continues to write, record and produce a plethora of material year-in year-out, in addition to contributing a column to Prospect magazine and a host of other projects. In 2014, he released not just one, but two brilliant albums in the space of two months with Karl Hyde from Underworld. His career tally so far is in the region of 26 studio albums, eight video albums, and a further 26 collaborative efforts and production credits on at least 40-plus records. 
The Ship is Eno’s first album in four years and his second for Sheffield label Warp, best known for being a home for avant garde experimentalists like Aphex Twin, Autechre and Battles. Consisting of two tracks (‘The Ship’ and ‘Fickle Sun’, which is split into three parts), it is an ambitious and extremely meditative affair. Only Eno would open a statement on his website explaining the album’s genesis with the words, “Humankind seems to teeter between hubris and paranoia...” It would be hard to mistake this for the new Motley Crue record.
The title track is a 20-minute ambient suite of spoken word and haunting electronica, lending credence to the claim that The Ship is a “musical novel”. The ship in question is the Titantic and Eno explores the First World War (“the extraordinary trans-cultural madness that arose out of a clash of hubris between empires”) and how the “unsinkable” ship tragically appeared to usher in an age of chaos and carnage. 
‘Fickle Sun’ is a triptych of tracks that concludes with a cover of ‘I’m Set Free’ by the Velvet Underground. Eno brings a brand new resonance to the lyric, “I’m set free to find a new illusion.” The Ship is a challenging, but enormously rewarding record, by one of the true masters of modern music.