HERE COME THE WARM JETS

Brian Eno's first solo album isn't a progressive electronic piece - it comes well before his acclaimed Discreet Music and Ambient series heralded his submersion in that genre. Rather, it's an arty, experimental, complex glam rock album featuring a range of collaborators from a dazzlingly broad spectrum of prog traditions, with members from Roxy Music, King Crimson, Hawkwind and Matching Mole amongst those helping out. Particularly significant contributors include former Roxy cohort Phil Manzanera and Robert Fripp, both of whom co-author some of the tracks.

With a sound ranging from the peaceful On Some Faraway Beach to the proto-punk Needle In the Camel's Eye or Blank Frank to the avant-garde Dead Finks Don't Talk, the album takes on a dizzying range of styles and proves that Eno is a composer to be reckoned with. It's also an emotionally warm album - and before you blame the titular jets, it's more likely that this is down to Eno's interesting studio techniques, which would include doing dances for the musicians to indicate the sort of mood he wanted to establish with the music. Of all the progressive electronic innovators, Eno is one who has always been very careful to include an emotional, intuitive aspect to his compositional process rather than simply relying on more and better electronics, and this album shows that this approach was there right from the beginning. Eno would create better art-glam albums, but this is a hell of a start.