Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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The Guardian JUNE 10, 2005 - by Dave Simpson

BRIAN ENO: ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH

If there are any bits of pop's sound and style that Roxy Music haven't influenced, their former keyboard player tidies up the rest. Although he's best known for his pioneering work in ambient music, Brian Eno's thirteenth solo album at last returns to the largely songbased electronic pop he created with 1970s albums such as Another Green World. The joy of hearing Eno's hushed, statesmanlike singing voice again is one thing, but the hymnal This and funky Under match anything in his canon.

Elsewhere, he develops the familiar theme of a man in awe of the natural landscape with icebound symphonies and lines such as "snow across the tundra". However, any suspicions that this is music made by a man who enjoys innumerable exotic holidays is spiked by the fifty-seven-year-old's increasing sense of unease at the world around. Bone Bomb, with lines about "young girls dreaming of beautiful deaths, pop star pictures above their heads" is genuinely unsettling. There are occasional echoes of the artists whose careers he has shaped as a producer (U2, Talking Heads) but his best album since 1977 is quintessentially Enoesque.