June 24, 2005
Time To Wake Up: A Primer
IBM is cutting 13,000 jobs here and in Europe, and will be adding 14,000 in India. A good explanation for global outsourcing can be found in Tom Friedman's new book The World Is Flat. He was also on NPR's Science Friday today, which can be found here. You don't change the country by replacing one wet-fingered politician with another, you change the country by changing which way the wind blows.
Posted by Daniel E. Boen at 02:35 PM | Comments (15503)
June 16, 2005
BACK
I hate Blogs. I don't read them, and they bug me, and they seem like a refuge for dot-commers who've recently become solvent again for the first time in a few years. Well mostly . I still need to put together a list of blogs from my friends.
Anyway, this thing exists only to help me sharpen my writing skills. I've been too busy to write lately, and I still am, but not writing is literally bad for my health. I'll do some record reviews again to start with - I've got a backlog of at least a dozen that I have to write something about.
More later. Jes.
Posted by Daniel E. Boen at 12:15 PM | Comments (6796)
Eno: Another Day On Earth (Hannibal)
Rating: ****
And so, seemingly without warning, poof! Brian Eno returns with his first full pop/vocal record in...27 years. 1978's Before And After Science was the last one, considered the end of his Rock Phase before turning to ambience and production for a long time to come. 1990's Wrong Way Up was a fine duet record with John Cale and is full of exemplary Eno pop - Spinning Away and The River come immediately to mind. That was a treat in itself, Eno singing again. As is this, and like Wrong Way Up, it's great not only because we've wanted one of these for awhile, but also because it's not at all what one would expect. But what can you expect from this guy, besides the unexpected? Expect something like an ambient pop album, but don't try to imagine what it will sound like, because, as often happens with this guy, it sounds quite a bit different from anything you've heard before.
Highlights: "This" starts the record off much where Wrong Way Up left off. A fine odd pop song with a snappy retro beat and streamish of consciousness lyrics. "And Then So Clear" is less scrutible, but reveals more pleasure with each listen. A delicate vocoder pitches Eno's voice up to robot-angel hights while the background reveals some rather discreet and beautiful chords. "Going Unconscious" is a pretty gorgeous hybrid of ambient music and narrative strangeness, with particularly great percussion. "Caught Between" is stunning space-gospel with appropriately selfless lyrics, "Passing Over" is more urgent, nervous and turbulent and features the man's knack for innovative backing vocals and weird borgish vocoder. "How Many Worlds" is the masterpiece, in which just a strumming, synthesized guitar, some chimes and the greatest string arrangement of the decade back up one of Eno's all time best songs. The title track is right up there with it, or just a tiny half notch below it, impossible to describe really. A slow funk groove with galactic sounds and swirls? It's better if I don't try.
The rest is really good too. It's a quiet record, and much less direct than you'd be likely to expect. The effects and instrumentation are so much more subtle than anything you're currently into, and the arrangements ride the line between performance and ambience for much of the album - it's not a record you could make your mind up on after one listen - something that obviously happened with the Pitchfork review. As usual, they get it completely wrong. Mark Richardson makes the mistake of trying to keep Eno's ambient music and his pop music separate. Hi Mark, there's a record Eno did called Another Green World that you're not so familiar with apparently, although it is one of those records that probably changed pop music forever. Though Another Day On Earth isn't trying to recapture that album's feel or songwriting style, it definitely shares a lot of its moods and its ambient slant. Richardson does a good job of letting us know how much he knows about Eno, but he doesn't get the record at all.
The only problems I have with the record is that it's not a little longer and it ends on a rather perfunctory note. And that there's a very Fripp-like solo here done not by Fripp but by someone who can kinda do Fripp. For Brian Eno, you'd think that only Fripp would do. Maybe they were weary of each other's company after recording the Equatorial Stars, which I'll write about hopefully in the next couple days. These are pretty minor quibbles though. This is my favorite record of the year so far.
NOTE: This record also marks the return of Hannibal Records, the great label that brought you Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Richard Thompson and the great producer Joe Boyd. Ryko has owned much of its properties for some time, and hopefully the resurrection of this imprint means great things to come.
- DB
Posted by Daniel E. Boen at 11:26 AM | Comments (15121)