Brian Eno: Here Come the Warm Jets vs Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) vs Another Green World vs Before and After Science

this one's so tough. forget the first two. for me it's the warm fuzz of another green world versus the masterful Before and After split--the amazing pop first half, and the mellowed out lush tones of the second half, grand finaling with "spider & i." fuck it. before and after science. it's got one of the best stanzas ever . . . if you study the logistics & heuristics of the mystics you will find that their minds rarely move in a line . . . but it's much more realistic to abandon such ballistics and resigned to be trapped on a leaf in the vine

ps -- another day on earth is good enough to poll with these first four

i shouldn't say forget the first two. the title songs on each of them are amazing. but still

I wanted to narrow it down to his 70s 'pop' stuff, otherwise there would be no end to what could have been included.

another day on earth is the only other vocal one i'd rank with these. but it's not my poll, so whatever

"The True Wheel" lifts TTM above all competition.

martin moscrop would agree

The one with the highest repeat value is probably Another Green World. (I mean some Eno songs are just plain annoying on some days)

Taking Tiger Mountain (By Stategy) was Lester Bangs' favorite, at least, according to this awesome piece linked to on another ILX Eno thread.

Tiger Mountain 4EVA!!!!!!

ugh here come the warm jets has two of my top ten songs ever, and it used to be my favorite album ever, BUT somehow, this year, another green world took over. so so so so sso so soso so so so close.

AGW > HCWJ > BAS > TTM

AGW is sorta the pinnacle of Eno in all senses...pop + ambient. I'd recommend it to anyone first, I think, and I definitely listen to it the most. HCWJ has less + better filler than the remaining two and just feels more exciting and colorful.

That said, 'Julie With' + 'Spider and I' and 'The True Wheel' +'Third Uncle' could compete with any two given songs from the other albums.

Another Green WOrld is fourth for me, but that's all i know. The other three are three of my favorite albums ever. I can't decide.

Tiger Mountain for me, with Warm Jets close behind, then Science. I think it's "Third Uncle" that puts it over the top.

Why would anyone want to live without any of these records, though?

Golden Hours on Green World puts it on top...maybe. Then the entire side 2 of Science and how wonderfully it flows make that the top choice. But Fripp's insane, peel-your-face-off solo on Baby's on Fire makes that album the obvious choice.
Damn,another impossible poll
Hey Kenan, I miss you dude.

Why would anyone want to live without any of these records, though?

why indeed? they're all terrific. but i lived with HCTWJ when it was released and it still makes me tingle. the array of weird musicians called in on that one and the style of songs just gels with me. i remember full well hearing it again for the 1st time in 10 years in 1994 and remembering every line and note.

No. Did you not read the Eno bible? It says
"Though shalt not pit these albums against one another"

Look, if someone corners me and makes me choose between Another Green World & Before and After Science, they might get thrown out of the bar. I'm warning you. Don't even try it.

I'm friends with the bartenders, see, and they know the bouncers, etc...

Except if you want to hear the title track to "Here Come The Warm Jets" then you can be my friend for life.

But to ask me to choose between Another Green World & Before and After Science is uncalled for.

BECALMED

About every 6 months I go nuts about Eno. I'm doing it again. That was my fave song off that album, was "Becalmed".

I like all of these, apart from Before And After Science, which always seems a bit patchy. My favourite is the mutant pop of Here Come The Warm Jets, but the other two are great as well, and sometimes the enveloping sounds of Another Green World shave it for me.

four of my favorite albums ever...

Up until a few months ago, it would have been down to Another Green World and Here Come the Warm Jets for me. But I've been obsessively playing Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) lately, and I'm convinced that the central minute of "Mother Whale Eyeless" with the organ/horn breakdown and female vox is maybe the greatest thing he ever laid down to tape. It's a shame that section is so short, it's such a tease!

Interesting, for me it's between Before And After Science and Taking Tiger Mountain.

I've never really felt the half instrumental/half vocal nature of Another Green World (or Low for that matter). And Here Come The Warm Jets is an awesome record but one that sounds like it could've been made by anybody + Robert Fripp.

Anyone reading this thread should read that Lester Bangs piece on Eno. It's really long, which is nice because it allows space for paragraph after paragraph of Eno monologue about everything from growing up in conservative Suffolk to his role in Roxy Music and subsequent departure, as well as LB going on about modern detachment:

His music, of course, is sort of depersonalized, and does seem to raise certain issues having to do with just exactly who's in the driver's seat, or who or what you're prepared to surrender it to. Yes, we entrust ourselves to technology every waking and sleeping minute, but with so much of what we experience today so pathetically diluted it seems strangely profligate to actually work to dilute it further. And when he is communing with his mechanical bride, who or what is communing back? There is no more reason to suppose that the voice rising from the feedback belongs to the pure and just than there is to consign these tools to demonology. Satan is of course not in the whirling belly of that gadget, but if there is a consciousness there, a knowing with a will, we at least deserve a glimpse of its eye which we are at least theoretically up against. Eno could be Alphaville's PR man reporting back to us with a smile and a shoeshine, or just a technoscout, at play in the fields of the lord, riding sunbeams and atoms. It is certain that there is an otherness at work in his music, but one often suspects it to be the hollow mysticism of the trackless microcosm of technology, rather than the Eastern Light apprehended in a radar blip. What we do look into when we come fact to fact with that which is spiritual and not human?

On the other hand, perhaps this all will ultimately amount to still waters that don't necessarily run deep; perhaps he has mistaken the buzzing of a TV test pattern for OMMMMMM. He first became obsessed with ambience after a brush with death via automobile accident, and if the art that he and so many of his peers are creating seems kind of weatherless, it could be because neither they nor the public want to recognize the raw edges and deeper flames; it could be that they associate any kind of intense feeling with death. In which case, Eno's work might be the ultimate sonic sartorial for the depersonalized, narcissistic sophisticate of the present and immediate future. But this refusal-- or inability-- to ultimately commit to anything in particular may well be what could ultimately prevent it from being great art. There are value systems beyond that which is merely "interesting" or useful for further experiments in the work of people like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Iannis Xenakis, George Crumb--everybody, really, who ever finally mattered-- and they all had specific humanistic social applications. We live at the first time in human history when the basic humanity of a given piece of art might be considered suspect, but maybe all that means is that ultimately no one will care about such works.

An alternative conclusion in Eno's case might be that his work embodies a sort of Zen approach to music, but even accepting that means that one must allow Eastern philosophy and technocracy into the same bed. The trouble with technocracy, of course, is that even if Eno is right and machines left to their own devices do tend to do the right thing, it seems an unfortunate fact of life in the present that the more human beings are confronted by the endless rightness of machines, the more inclined they become to surrender the reins entirely. In which case technology effectively becomes evil by sheer default, and Eno collaborates or at least flirts with his own oppression by the workings of those very systems which he embraced to avoid death by action: I've wondered many times if things like "Discreet Music" might not be leading down a path of passivity which ultimately would mean creative entropy. Meanwhile, he says that Music For Airports was seriously designed "to resign the listener to the possibility of death" in flight, and replies to the inevitable questions about potentialities for mind and crowd control with, "I've never thought of that actually as a possibility, because to me it's fun you see, actually, and I've never thought that anything that's fun could be used for crowd control."

Loads of info.

Also includes a selected discography at the end, which is nice even though LB is so woefully RONG about Devo ("sounds like tinkertoy music to me").

HCTWJ

^ otm

ps -- another day on earth is good enough to poll with these first four

uh, no way

anyway, very hard choice except TTMBS is not in the running for me; I like it but not nearly as much as I like the other three.

totally hard, this

tiger mountain = best, most cohesive strain of song/whimsy
here come the warm jets = best, most cohesive sound-world (actually, maybe another green world, there, though that one definitely = best individual songs)

have never really got 'before and after science', though i was listening to it on the way home just now and noticed the stanza quoted above for the first time

they're specially flavored
with burgundy, Tizer, and rye
twelve sheets of foolscap
don't ask me why

he central minute of "Mother Whale Eyeless" with the organ/horn breakdown and female vox is maybe the greatest thing he ever laid down to tape.

another reason (besides "True Wheel" and title track) that I voted for Tiger Mountain.

I wish I could explain how Another Green World & Before and After Science sounded to me as a teenager. They were the type of albums you would see in the marked down "cut-out" bins at the local record store, stuff obviously no one wanted to buy. They sounded well...sortof really daft and weird to me at the time. I loved them, don't get me wrong, but they sounded like the kind of thing time would forget. I didn't know anyone else who liked these albums. They seemed like my own secret, odd footnotes in the scheme of the musical world. It's only in retrospect that I can see them as these hip masterpieces.

Listening on iTunes shuffle a few minutes ago, I heard "Through Hollow Lands" from Before and After Science, and was then surprised at how well it segued into "Communist Daughter" from that hugely indie-popular Neutral Milk Hotel album -- I barely noticed the transition!

I voted for Before and After Science, btw.

tiger mountain ,just a bit above warm jets

When I flew to Morocco recently I listened to some of my Eno albums again. Taking Tiger Mountain is indeed awesome, and I think I may have to upgrade it sometime.

no vote from me, here. it would be like choosing between your own children.

"Another Green World". I like the electronic Brian Eno better than the "rock" Brian Eno. At least as long as he still hadn't gone all ambient and weird.

Tiger Mountain. Some days it's my favorite album.

impossible to choose. I'd love to see these re-issued in a vinyl box set.

ooooh, me too. I only have scratched up used cd copies of Before and After Science and Here Come the Warm Jets. I'd love to have them all on vinyl.

HCTWJ for me. In some ways it seems way more influential and ahead of its time than the others -- parts of it remind me of MBV, and parts even remind me of Boredoms, whereas AGW (for example) is great as well but mostly just sounds like Harmonia-gone-pop.

I love all 4 of these albums but it's warm jets without hesitation for me

BAAS -- not the best, but certainly my favorite.

I don't like Eno.

HA! just kidding. A little levity...I was listening to AGW just days ago, so that one. I confess to never having given as much time to BaAS as the others.

Yeah, I'm voting BAAS, as well.

Even though Green World is nominally one of my "favorite albums," presented with this particular choice, I can't not vote for Warm Jets. Maybe it's because, under the right circumstances, the title track can totally make me cry with its goofy beauty.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Aside from Roxy, his 70s productions and collaborations were covered here - Eno Related 70s Projects

Warm Jets

AGW!

This is an impossible poll. Each is perfect and they're all special in their own special, very different way.

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

hee hee: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04funny_humor.html?_r=1

Haha that person deserves a medal.

brian eno himself directed me towards that link ... or brian eno's twitter feed.

that article is awesome! i would love to have been there for that.

Warm Jets robbed

loveeee that article

Warm Jets Before and After Science robbed

Fixed... :-(

BAAS is last...that makes me so sad. I never really understood the appeal of TTM or HCTWJ that much. Maybe it's the context in which I first heard TTM that bugs me, I don't know. BAAS is so much more meaningful than HCTWJ. I guess I should be happy Green World won, though.

I assume BAAS came in last because, great as it is, it's the most conventional of the 4. It's Eno's Loaded.

eno's twitter really is fascinating

http://twitter.com/brianeno

It's Eno's Loaded.

Funny, as Loaded is my fav VU album...

ok, so i would have chosen "Before & After Science" because it still makes me weep on occasion, but this poll could really benefit from this essay i read recently by Trinie Dalton. it is about beer and Brian Eno, and essentially boils down to a discussion of what kinds of beers go best with each of this poll's four albums. it is really wonderful, and featured in the book called "Mythm" that doesn't seems to have a web presence. but yeah, great essay.

It's Eno's Loaded.

Funny, as Loaded is my fav VU album...

That was definitely not meant as a criticism of either album--they're both great. It appears that neither album inspires as much devotion as the more groundbreaking stuff (see here for the VU side of the argument).

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04funny_humor.html?_r=1
Yeah that was an awesome article tylerw, I wish Dondestan played next. In my experience with those online juke box things is that they have a bad selection and you can't play any song... some might even cut off long songs because it seemed like it did last night when a girl said she was going to play a song that was over 10 minutes. I dunno though, I was drunk.

On BAAS: I thin No One Receiving might be his most conventional, or agreeable pop song. I don't count the slow ones.

Funny, as Loaded is my fav VU album...

― ilxor, Saturday, February 7, 2009 10:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^^^real talk

# Still doing thge same but listening to Cranky Geeks. 11:17 AM Mar 27th, 2008 from web

This is screen name fodder, folks, get it now while you can.

I'll Come Running To Tie Your Shoes

I'll come running to eat your poo:

http://www.chocolateecstasytours.com/images/decadence2.jpg

"Her temperature's rising
But any idiot would know that"

such true words, decades in advance

and Fripp's guitar solo !