BRIAN ENO: EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY (w. David Byrne) (2008)
1) Home; 2) My Big Nurse; 3) I
Feel My Stuff; 4) Everything That Happens; 5) Life Is Long; 6) The River; 7)
Strange Overtones; 8) Wanted For Life; 9) One Fine Day; 10) Poor Boy; 11) The
Lighthouse.
Everything that happens once in Eno's life
eventually happens once again — you just have to be patient enough, sometimes
for twenty-seven years, which is the timespan that separates this record from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. However,
this album sounds nothing like it.
Maybe it would be improper to say that Eno and Byrne have mellowed out with age
— but some of their sides definitely have, and it is these sides that are facing each other now. The Wandering Knight of
Electronic Havoc and The Roving Shaman of Spastic Rock cast off their armor,
pack up their rituals, and quietly settle down on the porch of the house that
occupies the front sleeve. Not exactly a hobbit-like design, but a fairly
hobbit-like atmosphere all the same.
Since all the songs here feature vocals and are
quite Byrne-like in spirit, I was not altogether sure whether this should have
been included in Brian Eno's section — but as it turns out, most of the music
here actually belongs to Eno, who gave a bunch of his half-finished demos to
David and urged him to add his own vocal melodies. Interestingly, Eno himself
plays not just the keyboards here, but guitars, bass, electric drums, and even
some brass parts, although this is not really a one-man (or two-man) affair:
quite a few additional musicians were drafted to complete the proceedings,
most importantly, Leo Abrahams on guitars and Seb Rochford on drums.
In other words, this is not a «poppified ambient» record; Eno specifically selected those
of his demos that had a sharper pronounced rhythmic/dynamic flair to them, then
proceeded to convert them to full-fledged song status — and made one of the
finest decisions in his 21st century career to engage Byrne. Because one of the
things that actually didn't work well with Another
Day On Earth were the vocals: that whole «impersonal» approach to singing,
which worked well when he was young and creepy, seems to have gotten a bit
bland once he got older. Byrne, on the other hand, has lost none of the
strident charm of his youth even as his hair got all white, and his singing
adds a lot of personality and style to Eno's melodies.
Not that this is a great record — it is,
intentionally and purposefully, a laid-back record, an exercise in leisurely
contemplating life in all of its beauty and ugliness, in the face of a troubled
past, a shaky present, and an uncertain future, and somehow it seems even more
poignant and helpful in 2015, when I am writing this review, than it was in
2008. It totally works, yes, because Eno's melodies sound as if they were
conceived in a hammock on a hot, lazy summer day, and Byrne here is the good
old Byrne of ʽThis Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)ʼ, if you remember that
cozy, comfy coda to Speaking In Tongues.
A few of the tunes have jerky rhythm tracks, and a couple plunge into
disturbingly dark electro-funk (ʽPoor Boyʼ), but on the whole, this is a very
peaceful, though by no means rose-colored, affair. Byrne takes all sorts of
stuff for lyrical inspiration — but even something like ʽThe Riverʼ, allegedly
inspired by the Hurricane Katrina disaster, is a friendly, slow-rolling,
sentimental ballad in execution. And even if few songs are catchy or
heartbreaking, Byrne makes it all worthwhile by being as seductive as possible
— sometimes, when he rises all the way to falsetto, he almost comes across as
A-Ha's Morten Harket with a less cheap sense of taste and more intellectual
experience. It's... odd, but good.
Some descriptions, following Eno's and Byrne's
own interviews, pin this album down as «electronic gospel», and there might
indeed be a certain influence — primarily mood-wise, in its determination to
rejoice against all odds; but even such tracks as the closing ʽLighthouseʼ
could hardly be categorized as gospel, since they lack the energy and
straightforward passion of the average gospel epic (not to mention a good old
choir of black singers in the background). I would rather take this description
as tongue-in-cheek — a joking, but meaningful metaphor; and use it as a
ʽLighthouseʼ for those who are weary and desperate, maybe equally disillusioned
with the old world and afraid of the new one, but refusing to wallow in
dead-end pessimism, because "Everything that happens will happen today /
And nothing has changed but nothing's the same" in the long run, and I
guess this applies equally well to this album's music (heck, to music in general)
as it does to life in general. And this album kind of sucks, but it sort of
rules, and it gets a thumbs down but what you see is a thumbs up.
I'd have a lot more appreciation if the best song ("Home") didn't steal its best part from "The Sound of Silence".
ReplyDeleteAm I the only one who looked at the album cover and immediately thought of Jimi Hendrix's "Red House"?
ReplyDelete