Brian Eno
FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE
VERVE/UMC
While FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is Brian Eno’s first solo album of vocal-based song since 2005’s woozily moody Another Day on Earth, you have to go further back in the producer, artist, and ambient musician’s catalog to find a reference point for this, his open-air mediation on saving the planet and moving in an environmentally conscious fashion. That would be 1975’s Another Green World, its slow melodies and stripped-down arrangements, its soulful (for Eno at that point) sung-spoken, lower-octave vocals, and its lyrical ideals geared toward lava, little fishes, somber reptiles, dark trees, and that natural line in the horizon where everything light merges with the night.
In 2022, with his family (accordionist brother Roger, singing daughter Darla) and fellow electronic music maker Jon Hopkins, Eno emotes his hardcore feelings about how we torture this green world and will bring about its eventual demise if we don’t wise up. From the long, icy drone of “Making Gardens Out of Silence,” to the funeral-ethereal, birdsong-filled “There Were Bells,” to the brisky atmospheric “Who Gives a Thought,” to the holy, moldy chants of “We Let It In,” to the bass-bin-rattling “Garden of Stars” with its ham-fisted bomb noises, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE is mostly oddly beautiful and vaguely over-obvious in the lyric department, the latter strange for an Eno effort.
Still, any effort that allows Eno’s singing voice this much of an opportunity to shine and shimmer—especially an aged Eno, more-raspy and coolly R&B-like—against such spare, rich melody is great and good with this reviewer. Let the sun shine in and the green world blossom.
