Eno 70's vocal album opening tracks

voted!

The drumming on "No One Receiving"!

why ask why

xp Phil Collins yeah?

Or is it Jaki? Or Dave Mattacks?

actually i think

maybe she will do a bit of spying

is my favourite single line/melody

It’s Phil iirc?

i have to go with sky saw. that robotic elephant ass synth-guitar sound ripping across the track just gets me

yes, but also with Rhett Davies on "Agogô [Agong-gong], Percussion [Stick]"

xp!

No One Receiving all damn day.

"robotic elephant ass synth-guitar sound ripping across the track"

beautifully said

Can't choose between the first two.

Burning Airlines is great and one of his funniest but doesn't quite burn or catch heat, it's too sarcastic and detached. No One Receiving is even better but is maybe too easy in its joyous stark psychedelic funk, something bowie was doing a few years before on Young Americans and Station to Station. Needle and Sky Saw are both in the very top tier of 70s art rock, the former retrofitting glam stomp and shout with wild eyed intellectual abstraction, and the latter fusing electric miles with a depressed person's idea of the beach boys.

Voting Needle. It's just a perfect statement of intent for track one of his solo career, passionate yet detached, unearthly yet catchy, and a worthy improvement on the driving ecstatic sound of Virginia Plain that i'm not sure Roxy ever bettered.

There are a lot of covers of this one, too, Elf Power's is probably better than Volcano Suns or Queens of the Stone Age, there are dozens on Spotify I've never heard before including a solo demo by what's his name from Game Theory that brings out how this song is kind of a proto Neutral Milk Hotel song.

Burning Airlines, best lyrics, the sound of the Wurlitzer pickup into the backing vocal entry is aural caffeine to my ears. It’s not only my fave of these four, it is likely my favourite Eno solo track overall

“No one receiving” has big time RiL energy.

"Needles in the Camel's Eye", what a track to start a solo career on. Out of a gazillion albums (not that I've heard them all... but enough), it might be my very favorite track of his. probably prefer Another Green World or Before and After Science to Warm Jets, but I don't think they start with their best tracks

i surprised myself by voting "sky saw"! _another green world_ is where eno stops being _queer_ for me. give me eno bitchily saying the leather looks better on _him_! but with all that, that metal screaming, "all the clouds turn to words", the nonsense chanting...

honorable mention to "i fall up" as a sort-of sequel to the latter two. "my squelchy life", to me, that's the equal of the four 70s records. a controversial opinion, i'm sure!

no that's a fucking great song

‘Sky Saw’ for John Cale’s funk viola

‘Sky Saw’ for John Cale’s funk viola

Speaking of Eno opening tracks, I enjoy singing “This” to myself when I enter a room and am looking at objects in it

‘Sky Saw’ for John Cale’s funk viola

yeah "This" is amazing as well

Yep.

"Sky Saw" was my Eno intro -- one od the few tracks where the bass sounds like it's murmuring a secret conversation like the Ents in LOTR.

yeah it's a properly alien track, the vocal harmonies are all kinds of upsetting

I live in the “I listened to too much Cluster to be impressed by Another Green World” district, small neighbourhood and we’re all sour people

I do have a pretty sweet “I’ll Come Running To Tie Your Shoe is the worst song on Eno’s 70s solo vocal record” t-shirt tho

I know it's not his album but "Heaps of Sheeps" should be an honorable mention too, also an incredible way to start an album

cosign

It's still Feb. 8th here so there's time to mention that Here Come the Warm Jets is 50 years old today.

Awesome

I know it's not his album but "Heaps of Sheeps" should be an honorable mention too, also an incredible way to start an album

― frogbs

very #onethread, i've been talking over on the wyatt thread about how much _shleep_ means to me. my favorite wyatt album by a country mile.

speaking of #onethread i wanna spend a little more time gushing about _my squelchy life_, which in a way is sort of the last gasp of Queer Eno to me (as opposed to Techbro Eno). that one bit from "i fall up", "more suck at the duct my dictu", to me that's _very_ much of a piece with his glam albums, it's not explicitly queer but at the same time is very obviously queer

and then there's "stiff". musically i find it about as obnoxious as "i'll come running"? but i also kind of like "i'll come running". it's obnoxious but in a way i find endearing. the lyrics, though, it's just such an amazing anthem of queer submissive desire, down to the double meaning of the title. there's only one way for me to be stiff these days, but for eno there are two ways, just like there were two ways for me back in the day, with the extra layer that being one made me want to be the other, hooray for gender dysphoria.

the desire eno expresses is healthy and normal and even _healing_ and at the same time kind of fucked up, and that's the sort of complexity i really lean into with kink. wanting to be "helped" and "changed" and at the same time wanting to "have every plea for mercy overruled". merciless affirmation is definitely a _very_ powerful form of kink, particularly for those of us who've spent out whole life being mercilessly treated the opposite way (like, for instance, nearly all queer people).

and then of course there are the puns:

I wanna be cut
I wanna be dried

so much of _warm jets_ takes stuff that's not kinky and makes it implicitly kinky, and the lyrics here take stuff like bloodplay that's a pretty extreme form of kink (particularly coming after "I wanna be served up lightly dressed and on a plate", and yeah i know people who are into that and it's _normal_ to want that, to have a cannibalism fetish, no matter how fucked up it sounds) and recontextualizes it as something mundane and cliche. which i like a lot. i like to think that if eno had a fetlife profile (and fuck he very well might) it would look a lot like the lyrics to "stiff".

looking up the lyrics genius says "you might also like: Think U The Shit (Fart) by Ice Spice". did eno produce this? is this actually a song i might like? i don't know. i like the title, but i'm not sure the song can live up to that title.

i am a lifelong cluster head and consider AGW one of the best albums ever. they don’t get in each other’s way. even at its most alien AGW is deeply human, romantic even, while cluster are truly kosmische.

the bits of before and after science that feel RiL-lite however are lessened for me by the association unfortunately

Not sure I agree with that description of Cluster!

"Needles" is the epitome of a great album opener, and one of his best songs, but I may go "Sky Saw," which is not necessarily one of his best songs though also an incredible opener but maybe more of a ... statement? Anyway, Phil's drums on "Sky Saw" are awesome.

xpost i guess i hear cluster as kosmische even at their most pastoral in that they evoke a formal earthly beauty that seems to me indifferent to humanity. an endless motorik rhythm describing the edges of tree leaves rather than the repetition of the highway

Possibly true of Sowiesoso but not really of Zuckerzeit I think (which of course directly precedes AGW).

yeah i was thinking of sowiesoso. but zuckerzeit doesn't encroach upon AGW territory either for me, not sure why exactly, still just sounds cosmic to me in a way AGW isn't i guess

I do love AGW it's just my least-favourite of "the four". I like Eno's voice and lyrics!

"Sky Saw" is probably my least favorite of the AGW vocal tracks honestly. its just that the others are so good. "Everything Merges With the Night" is one of the prettiest songs I've ever heard really.

See, I was thinking of it as the best "opener" qua opener. (Did I use "qua" right?) That is, setting the mood/stage. Though I guess as a tuneful adenoidal outburst "Needles" does that just as well.

Can I just say that after 30+ years of listening to these records, they still constantly surprise/excite me?

Voted "No One Receiving", partly because of how well it leads into "Backwater". Overall, I like "Queer Eno" a lot more, but don't love how those records open.

Queeno?

I want to add to the affection for "Heaps of Sheeps."

Qua is the name of the last Cluster album :)

another “heaps of sheep” lover here, would rank number two or maybe one here for me.

I think of these first four Eno records as sort of a songbook, a collection of disparate sounds and ideas and fragments and songs and approaches that he (and others) would return to for years to come.

voted for sky saw. i love that it's not even clear until half way into the song that this is one of the ones with vocals. not to mention the wonderful fretless bass and all the stop/start elements.

Sky Saw actually makes me dizzy in a way very few other songs do, it's not exactly pleasant though

We/someone/I should poll all the songs from these albums.

To repeat myself from another thread: as Newland Archer says to Ellen Olenska: these four records, each time I hear them, happen to me all over again.

I take breaks from them, sometimes, and then they're (even) fresher when I go back. A song like "Blank Frank," for example, I'd gotten so used to it that after some time off I put it on again and for the first time ever my reaction was, wow, what a weird song!

Many years ago I got a copy of the "More Dark Than Shark" book. I recall it had a lot of interesting tidbits about these early albums. It's been a while since I dug it out...

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Sky Saw

In the Australian post-punk movie Dogs In Space, there's a character who puts on AGW every time he gets laid*- iirc there are a couple of instances where Sky Saw starts playing to signal this event occurring - and at one point another character is mid-crisis and screams "turn that fucking Eno record off" - which (possibly mis-remembered) phrase became part of the schoolyard vernacular amongst my group of friends

so Sky Saw, but also because it's my favourite and AGW is my favourite

* I actually had independently developed a similar practice as a teen but mine involved Music For Films

the weather's fine and I feel so so-so

(by which I mean, I am voting for Needles..., partly because the line above swims around my head on a regular basis)

Burning Airlines for me. TTM(BS) is probably my most-listened-to Eno album these days.

Didn't vote for it but "Burning Airlines" is just about the catchiest song he ever wrote.

I went for 'No One Receiving' and then had to listen to the whole album.

went in thinking "needles," left voting for "no one receiving"

As the impetus (?) behind this poll, I'm gonna enjoy a typical lunch time cram session listen.

Warning: may liveblog.

(listening via Apple Music even though I own all the LPs due to work, sorry)

I think we can all agree NITCE is a lively start to any debut solo album.

The wanky trem action was supposedly played/manipulated by Eno while Phil did the chording/strumming is some proto-glide guitar?

The solo is a bit "finger exercises in E major" but the 3 beat pause/silence in the bridge is a trick pulled straight out of Brian Wilson's pocket ("Good Vibrations").

BAGYSMM, definitely heading in a more interesting and arty direction than NITCE.

Opening guitar figure is quirky, the drumming more stuttering and off beat.

Probably my favorite parts are when Eno's piano triplets enter the mix.

There's more effort happening as well, double tracked background vox in an attempt to marry the pretty with the bizarre.

These may be my favorite lyrics of the 4, still need to relisten NOR again though.

Sky Saw... Ok before I begin I have to admit I HATE fretless bass, in particular this farty fusion brand of fretless bass. Absolute cringe/nails-on-chalkboard for me, sorry. I cannot vote for this track unless I can find a way to scrape it from the original track and be replaced by something more tasteful, despite all the other amazing things happening here.

I feel like Eno sat down Percy before recording "No One Receiving" and said, "my man, please stop all that wanky shit you were doing on 'Sky Saw' (or at least restrain it to a minimum)" and though it's less irritating than "Sky Saw" it still stands out like a stale fart in a cramped elevator.

NOR is a great song but after this lunch hour I think BAGYSMM is by far my favorite of the 4.

Burning Airlines, best lyrics, the sound of the Wurlitzer pickup into the backing vocal entry is aural caffeine to my ears. It’s not only my fave of these four, it is likely my favourite Eno solo track overall

― a hyperlink to the past (flamboyant goon tie included), Thursday, February 8, 2024 4:40 PM (six days ago)

Much better stated here ^^^

excellent, ty (and yes your Warm Jets take inspired me to do this)

A lot of the tracks on "Warm Jets" derive from Eno's simple but inspired approach of getting the musicians to take multiple stabs at a song (as expected), but then dumping the different takes together on the track at once. I think that's what leads to the glorious cacophony, especially on stuff like "Camel's Eye" and the title track.

Ironically, a lot of Bryan Ferry's stuff enlists a similar if predictably slicker approach, cobbling together takes from several sessions recorded over the span of years, which is how you end up with songs like "Loop De Li," which features Neil Hubbard, Steve Jones, Johnny Marr, Nile Rodgers, Oliver Thompson and David Williams as credited guitarists. The next track on the album credits Neil Hubbard, Steve Jones, Johnny Marr, Nile Rodgers, Jacob Quistgaard, Chris Spedding, Jeff Thall, Oliver Thompson and David Williams on guitar (nine guitarists on a track!!!!). The title track of "Avonmore" credits Flea, Guy Pratt and Paul Turner all on bass.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

may all of yee be severed in heaven by the sky saw

well all but 14

Try bud dry

I fell in love-at-first-sight with my first (and last) girlfriend at an Eno tribute night. I'd just turned 21. I went on my own, I saw the listing for "Eno tribute night" at the Reverb and decided to go. One of the bands featured a high school friend I hadn't seen since graduating, the band was called American Girlfriends and they did "Backwater" and "Evening Star". They were great

But then this goth band got up and my future girlfriend who I'd never seen before got up to the mic and sang "Needle In The Camel's Eye". The bassist (her ex, he was and is a total sweetheart) did the backing vocals and it was just the best thing I'd ever heard. It was as louder and more exciting than the recording, a total coup de graçe. "Cindy Tells Me" followed and yes it was good but whatever, nothing could beat that opening.

It turned out that a friend of mine was the singer's roommate, and I said "I am in love with her" and the mutual friend invited me over to hang, and we started dating, I joined her band, the whole thing lasted a year and ten months and then it was over. When we were in the fantasising-about-marriage phase she told me she wanted to walk down the aisle to "Here Come The Warm Jets".

She would later joke that she "turned me gay" but that wasn't true, she just kept me in the closet for another couple years is all

Healthy totals for all four. I wouldn't have put "No One Receiving" above "Sky Saw" though.

I do have a pretty sweet “I’ll Come Running To Tie Your Shoe is the worst song on Eno’s 70s solo vocal record” t-shirt tho

They're lackluster at worst, but I'd nominate:

The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch
Put a Straw Under Baby
Little Fishes (if it's a "song")

I HATE fretless bass, in particular this farty fusion brand of fretless bass

Interesting, I'm not sure if this sound was even that associated with fusion in 1975! Jaco Pastorius didn't release any records till the next year.

Pretty sure I voted for "Needles" here, I made a video for it in high school (a weird foreshadowing of the opening of Velvet Goldmine eight years later). I ruined the sleeve of my copy of the first Roxy record for a shot where I stuck multiple needles through the eyes of Eno's portrait in the gatefold.

Fun fact: apparently Bill Wyman may have been the first fretless player.

the bass on sky saw is like completely low passed, isn’t? the farting is from eno’s synth

There are two basses: Paul Rudolph on "anchor bass", presumably playing the tonic-fifth pattern on every chord, and Percy Jones on fretless bass who's playing fills throughout.

so glad this is still on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1_bYvxhBlE

(closing track not opening, but still)