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For Eno fans, this has been a long-awaited album: his first album containing vocal work since 1995′s Nerve Net. And that album didn’t have a whole lot of vocals to speak of. The last true vocal album was his collaboration with John Cale – Wrong Way Up. For people like myself, waiting for this album has been a lot like waiting for the final Star Wars installment was for other folks.

Life as a fan of Brian Eno is bittersweet. Another Green World, Music for Airports, On Land, Nerve Net, The Shutov Assembly and many others are all brilliant, life-altering albums that are entirely worthy of devotion. Others albums like The Drop, Bell Studies for the Clock of Long Now and many others are somewhere between awful and completely forgettable.

So the question is: where does Another Day on Earth fall in those lists? Somewhere in between. One song is perfect, but it’s not exactly a new song (Under). A few songs are as good as his better work (This, And Then So Clear, Passing Over). But most of the album feels like unfinished film work – where the song starts with some nice atmospheres, but never really builds to anything much (Just Another Day, A Long Way Down, Going Unconscious).

The few songs I really enjoy on the album have a few particularly awkward moments, where you wonder what Eno was thinking. For example, Eno has a particular fondness for bells – but his repetition of the word "bells" in the song "This" makes the song clunky from the start. It doesn’t help that the song ends with some pretty loose vocalizing. I get the feeling he just didn’t know how to end it.

On another, Passing Over, the song is moving along quite nicely when Eno begins singing in a deep, modulated, frog-like voice. It’s one of those moments where you just look at your iPod and think to yourself "why?, why did you just do that to this song?".

The real pickle about this album of vocal work is that it isn’t nearly good as his unreleased album My Squelchy Life. Apparently his record company took too long to release the album, and Eno felt it was no longer relevant. The funny thing is, Another Day on Earth sounds a lot like it in many ways: except Squelchy Life has better lyrics, more strings and less percussion.

All in all, "Another Day on Earth" isn’t a bad album. But it’s not a great album either, and it’s likely to get as much play as Spinner or Drawn from Life – listenable, but ultimately forgettable.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.