Oblique Strategies fueled by idiot energy

Four albums=four reasons to be thankful for Brian Eno

By Cory Casciato
casciato@mscd.edu

Brian Eno should have starred in "The Man Who Fell to Earth."

The 1976 cult film about an alien masquerading as a human starred David Bowie, a reasonable choice considering his cultivated, self-consciously weird image and frequent use of sci-fi imagery. Eno, though, managed to be a lot weirder than Bowie without ever seeming to try. Bowie leaned on lyrical cues to express his futurism, but Eno's records exude a pervasive aura of other-worldliness; rock and roll as interpreted by The Man From Mars, pop songs from Jupiter, soundtracks from deep space. Beginning with Here Come the Warm Jets in 1973 and ending with Before and After Science in 1977, Eno's rock phase combined that alien quality with a prodigious talent and what he termed "idiot energy" to produce four of the best, most original rock albums of all time.

His debut was the explosion of a restless mind unleashed, careening from glam to prog, stopping at pop to refuel before launching into unexplored territories that later became the basis for punk, metal and techno. From the almost-conventional chamber pop of "Cindy Tells Me" to the unhinged, proto-punk, warbling wail of "Blank Frank," from the dark, menacing theater of "Baby's on Fire" to the surreal, absurd comedy of "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch" and "Dead Finks Don't Talk," Jets put the rock world on notice that something new was in the air.

He followed the schizophrenic chaos of Jets with the abrupt about-face Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy). A quasi-conceptual album inspired by a set of postcards depicting a Maoist revolutionary play, Strategy is a surreal soundtrack to a fevered dream of a spy film. It's a bizarre tale of eyeless whales, burning airlines and blind commandos set to a shifting, ever-evolving musical accompaniment. It encompasses everything from dissonant guitars and squelching synthesizers to sing-along choruses and catchy piano hooks (often in the space of a single song) without ever sounding forced or unnatural. Every song is nearly perfect, layering simple elements in inspired fashion with sublimely beautiful and startlingly strange results.

His next move was another masterpiece and nearly as big of a departure. On Another Green World Eno traded Strategy's dense arrangements and claustrophobic themes for a gentle minimalism. Consisting of nine instrumentals and five vocal pieces, World uses masterful pacing and sequencing to create a reflective mood. The instrumental pieces flow by, propelled by an ambient pulse and restrained percussion. The pop songs are among his best, from the should-have-been-a-hit appeal of "St. Elmo's Fire" to the introspective melancholia of "Golden Hours."

For his final dip in the dark water of rock, Eno returned to the eclectic tendencies of Jets with Before and After Science. Eschewing the cohesion of his second and third albums, Science bounces from idea to idea with energy and enthusiasm. Brittle funk, whimsical folk and meditative hymnals are all fair game, and the results are always interesting, if less awe-inspiring than the rest of his work. More than any of his other albums, Science shows off Eno's oddball sense of humor, whether he's sending a coded mash note to a band he liked ("King's Lead Hat" is an anagram of Talking Heads, whom he went on to work with later) or dropping lyrics that come off like Dr. Seuss for linguistics grad students, such as "If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics, you will find that their minds rarely move in a line" from "Backwater."

Eno's idiosyncratic body of work was the result of equally unusual methods. An admitted non-musician who names the tape recorder as his favorite instrument, Eno displayed an intuitive grasp of song-craft throughout his body of work. He worked with a diverse cast of collaborators, purposely utilizing performers whose styles clashed or seemed incompatible. He developed a set of cards with abstract instructions on them, called "Oblique Strategies," to use as a tool for composition. In the studio, he would flip through them or draw one at random and use the instructions to guide his work. He became the first virtuoso of the studio-as-instrument, processing, manipulating and treating sounds until they were unrecognizable to the performers who played them, utilizing delay, reverb, filters and other effects to create impossible spaces and previously-unknown timbres. His lyrics were usually chosen as much for their sound as their meaning and were often dream-inspired, making for infinitely malleable interpretations. And it probably didn't hurt that he was a certified freak with a legendarily prodigious and perverse sexual appetite, a predilection for collecting pornographic playing cards and a mind that was never afraid to go places no one had gone before.

Even now, almost 30 years after his last rock album was released, his work still sounds fresh. Like a strange transmission from a distant star, it seems to exist almost without context, exotic and anomalous. Like the protagonist in "The Man Who Fell to Earth," Eno's work might appear normal to the casual observer, but a deeper look reveals something unique, weird and wonderful.