ANOTHER GREEN WORLD

After two interesting solo albums by Eno (Here Come the Warm Jets, and Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy), we come to this third album, Another Green World. Though many Brian Eno fans consider this the best of the early rock albums, this one has always seemed like the weakest of the bunch. Maybe it the rather tame songwriting approach that he took on this one. The songs on the first two solo albums have more life and humor to them, and are much more memorable. Here, the songs sound half-finished, as though he is lacking ideas or inspiration. Another problem is the lacking of drums. There are drums on a few tracks (Phil Collins, yeah!, as he is on several of Eno's albums), but in their place on many of the songs is an early drum machine that sounds really goofy at times and amateurish. I'm not sure why Eno didn't just use a real drummer. The songs suffer because of that.

The sound quality for the album in vinyl format has alway been very muddy, lacking treble and clarity. I can only hope that the currently released version on CD has been remastered.

On the positive side, there are more songs on the album than previously (14 instead of the usual 10 or so), so there are most song ideas, I suppose.