Another Day on Earth

 

 

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This is Brian Eno at his best. I won't get into the many reasons why you need to own this CD (lyrics, rhythms, composition,...) If you ever have appreciated his diverse talents in the past - you require this ensemble of amazing songs. This is Brian Eno's career at it's fruition!

Listening to this music it occurs to me that Brian Eno didn't need to produce another pop CD. Even thirty-year-old CD's from Eno's catalogue sound like they were produced just yesterday.

But Eno did decide to put out these unbelievably beautiful pieces of recorded music. And I am very delighted he did.

"Another Day on Earth" is one of the richest and most satisfying albums Brian Eno has released in a 35 year span of brilliant releases. This one has such an atmosphere of deep introspection, maturity and rarefied uniqueness of vision that it holds you spellbound to the very last second. If this is "just another day" in Brian Eno's world it's one that I would love to inhabit.

You want to drink this world in, to the lees, savour it and have it fill you with it's profound sense of peace. Yet it's not the kind of peace that comes from anaesthesia or mindless soporifics, this peace emanates from a long life of constant questioning, from the transcendance of doubt, pain, loss, and the concommitant loneliness of journeying at times along frontiers largely unvisited by the common throng. The peace, or serenity, of "Another Day on Earth" is not a passive one, in fact, psychologically, mentally, this album is remarkably active ... very, very awake and engaged. It is the work of a mind plenum rich with experience and insight.

The familiar "Eno" elements and trademarks are here, sparklingly fresh and yet as comfortable as home. It is SO good to hear his voice again, to hear him doing songs once more, despite his reticence to do much in that vein. When one of his "song' recordings comes along it is an event and well worth the many years it takes him to put one out. 1990's "Wrong Way Up" was the last one Eno released and it was also a much-awaited event. "Another Day" makes a perfect companion to his "Drawn from Life" and seems to be the verbal twin to it's largely instrumental predecessor.

All the songs on "Another Day" are wonderful but some really stand out. The album's opener, "This", is pure, classic Brian Eno. It's Arabic inflections in his singing reflect his ongoing love of all things African. "And Then So Clear", in its crystalline spaciousness and intimacy, is so utterly beautiful it reaches way down deep in your mind. "A Long Way Down" is exceptionally atmospheric and creates an aural picture so deep and vast it's almost as disconcerting as it is serene. "How Many Worlds" is the centrepiece of the album. Eno's deeply felt concern for the world and his certainty that we can make a huge difference in it by acting simply in a conscious way is the theme of this almost childlike but emotionally very moving song. For all his legendary technical acumen, Brian Eno never once strays in his art from being very fully human. "Just Another Day" showcases his wonderful voice, double-tracked in harmonies and singing of an unspecified day in such a way that you could say that this life is "just another day on earth". ... "One day we will put it all behind, we will say, that was just another time, we'll say, that was just another day on earth" ...

For all its apparent serenity "Another Day on Earth" is an artfully varied, complex and thematically animated work. Rigorous in detail, as always, and hardly what one would call ambient, it is paradoxically a quieter recording with an enormous amount of provocative goings-on.

Absolutely indispensible release from one of the great artists and cultural theoreticians of our time.

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