301. Brian Eno - Here Come The Warm Jets (1974)















Track Listing

1. Needles In The Camel's Eye
2. Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch
3. Baby's On Fire
4. Cindy Tells Me
5. Driving Me Backwards
6. On Some Faraway Beach
7. Blank Frank
8. Dead Finks Don't Talk
9. Some Of Them Are Old
10. Here Come The Warm Jets

Review

Some of you might have noticed by now that I have a big love for all things Brian Eno. This is his first solo album, the third album that he participates in on the list, the other two being the Roxy Music albums. Mr. Eno makes an album of pop-music here, but very particular pop - if you like Roxy Music's early albums you will love this, Eno was always in a battle with Brian Ferry between the weird (Eno) and the beautiful (Ferry). Here Eno is able to indulge in all the weirdness that he always wanted and with that he creates one of the best albums of all times, and the first solo album of a pretty great career.

Eno is probably the person which is most represented throughout the list, from the production of Talking Heads and U2 albums to his myriad collaborations with David Bowie or David Byrne, to a very impressive solo career and the fact that he simply appears in everyone's albums. Here you actually see what makes him so special.

Even though this album is a triumph of the weird, the beautiful is not gone. Although the album is not immediately accessible you will uncover levels of a slightly deranged beauty. On Some Faraway Beach and the title track are great examples of this, the whole album is also pervaded by a constant deranged sense of humour that really works for me. And then it is a triumph of production work, there are so many little intricacies here that you can hear it hundreds of times without being fully aware of everything, not even what is being sung.

Eno's voice is not amazing, but it is so well used, he makes such good technical use of his voice by surrounding it with the right sounds that it just sounds perfect for his music. Pretty much a perfect album, you even have proper pop-single tracks like the first one and Baby's On Fire, both part of the soundtrack of Velvet Goldmine. So get this album today from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Here Come The Warm Jets
2. Needle In The Camel's Eye
3. Some Of Them Are Old
4. Baby's On Fire

And all other tracks.


Final Grade

10/10


Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The album's musical styles range from aggressive garage rock ("Blank Frank") to serene Beach Boys-style reverie ("On Some Faraway Beach"). Eno enlisted a large number of guest musicians to play on the album, including three members of Roxy Music, guitarist Robert Fripp and bassist John Wetton of King Crimson and members of Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies. One of the most notable performances from these guests is the cacophonous three-minute-long guitar solo by Fripp on the song "Baby's On Fire".

"Warm jets" is used by Eno to describe the distorted guitar in the title track, which evokes the sound of a jet engine. Eno himself claims that he often chooses words for their sound.

The album provided Eno with modest success in the UK album charts, and would in fact be his only album to chart for the remainder of the 1970s apart from 1978's Music for Airports.

In 2003, the album was ranked number 436 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Some juggling with Baby's On Fire, unfortunately quite cut from its 5 minute length: