Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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New York Times MAY 22, 2014 - by Jon Pareles

ENO AND HYDE: SOMEDAY WORLD

The future is funky, fitfully optimistic and oddly familiar on Someday World (Warp), a collaborative album by Brian Eno and Karl Hyde of Underworld. It started with tracks Mr. Eno had shelved from a project he was calling Reikuti, mingling the steady pulse of Steve Reich's Minimalism with the Afrobeat of Fela Anikulapo Kuti; Mr. Hyde and Mr. Eno collaborated on words and music to build them into songs. The results are far less synthetic or club oriented than might be expected. Instead, the music circles back toward what Eno was recording in the late 1970s and early 1980s on his own albums and with Talking Heads, with ever-changing chatter among guitars and keyboards and beats that bubble up and recede - particularly in the album's peppiest song, A Man Wakes Up, which both describes and embodies the way sensory overload can turn into euphoria. It's an uneven album, with stretches that were probably more fun in the studio than on replay. But in its better moments, percolating rhythms and genial vocal harmonies harbor apocalyptic thoughts, as in Witness: "Did you ever dream the end of the world, watching everything you love slip beneath the flood?"