TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN (BY STRATEGY)

Brian Eno's second release maintains practically the same levels as the debut, and starts concerning more about politics, Oriental culture, and espionage.

"Taking Tiger Mountain", compared to "Here Come The Warm Jets" , is much darker, musically, but especially lyrically speaking. Despite this, the musical style remains pretty much the same; memorable melodies, fascinating arrangements, and oddities here and there. Eno's vocals though aren't so quirky anymore; he seems to prefer a more "normal" type of singing, without any nasal or exaggerated excerpts. Even in this record Eno had many people helping him and surrounding him; The dear friends Robert Fripp and Phil Manzanera on guitars, Robert Wyatt on drums and percussion ( the recording of this album was prior to the terrible incident of this one), and many others. Phil Collins also joins in for one song, on drums.

"Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)", like I mentioned earlier, is focused, thematically speaking, on the Chinese revolution, Maoism, and espionage. In fact, "Taking Tiger Mountain" was originally the name of a Chinese opera, that concerned these themes. Even in this album the artist uses his typical, unusual method in putting down lyrics: singing nonsense syllables to himself, put them on paper, and find a sense creating words and phrases. The lyrics, in this way, are eccentric, but very fascinating.

Despite Taking Tiger Mountain isn't quite as masterful as "Here Come The Warm Jets", it has some brilliant songs, that sometimes are even better than the ones from the debut: "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More", "The Fat Lady Of Limbourg", "Mother Whale Eyeless","The Big Wheel" are excellent examples of songs that maintain the same style that the first album had. We also find some different approaches: "The Great Pretender" is very electronic and very fresh sounding, and "Third Uncle" is proto punk piece. To be mentioned has to be the wonderful title track, a great outro to the album and intro to the following Eno album, "Another Green World", possibly his finest masterpiece.

In conclusion, a terrific album, a second album not quite as good as the previous one, but still very highly recommended.