j o e

The Domed One's sophomore solo effort continues to mine the eccentro-rock documented previously on Here Come the Warm Jets. It's not quite as fresh the second time around, but still pretty cool. Highlights are "Back in Judy's Jungle," "Mother Whale Eyeless," "China My China," and "The True Wheel," all lyrically deranged as is typical for Eno at this stage in his career, but still highly accessible. Also give a listen to the unnerving "Put a Straw Under Baby," which features the string section of the remarkable Portsmouth Sinfonia. This was a compiled 'orchestra' of musicians assigned to instruments with which they weren't familiar (Eno was one of the woodwind players). The album also features Phil Manzanera, Phil Collins, and Robert Wyatt. review by Joe McGlinchey — 7-23-00 —

m a t t

Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) is unique among Brian Eno's 1970s pop albums in that it was recorded by a stable lineup. The core band is Eno, guitarist Phil Manzanara, bassist Brian Turrington and drummer Freddie Smith. There are some guest musicians and back-up vocalists (Phil Collins and Robert Wyatt being the most notorious of the lot) but Tiger Mountain is, for the most part, a guitar/bass/drums album with occasional keyboard contributions by Eno. That such a sonically rich batch of songs was created from this limited instrumentation is, of course, a testament to Eno's talents for producing textures. Recorded in 1974, Tiger Mountain was the last of Eno's '70s albums to be unaffected by his growing interests in ambient music (both Another Green World and Before and After Science have atmospheric instrumental tracks). In many ways, I think it's the quintessential Brian Eno pop album. More focused than his debut, Taking Tiger Mountain is arguably the ultimate expression of Eno's absurdism. The title takes its name from a Chinese opera that Eno learned about when he saw a series of postcards depicting scenes thereof. Eno used the images on these cards as inspiration for a number of the songs, but he never actually saw the opera and did not investigate the story. The scattered Chinese references might give one the initial impression that Taking Tiger Mountain is a concept album (a concept album gone awry, if one actually attempted to interpret the album as a narrative) but Eno did not intend for the album to tell a story; each song is a self-contained episode. The lyrics to any particular song may or may not make much sense when taken as a whole, but they work perfectly while in their respective musical contexts. To underscore the point that his words had no meaning apart from the music, Eno purposely declined to have the lyrics printed on the LP sleeve. With the possible exception of the dadaist lullaby "Put a Straw Under Baby," I think that every song on this album is excellent and built to last many rotations on your CD player. "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More," "Mother Whale Eyeless," "The True Wheel" and "China My China" are among the juiciest pop songs that Eno ever wrote and their virtues speak for themselves. The other songs might initially seem a bit more aloof but I think that they open up and become just as compelling as the rest upon closer inspection. "The Fat Lady of Limbourg" and "The Great Pretender" lurch along deliberately and do interrupt the momentum of the album (likely contributing to the general opinion that this record lacks the energy of Eno's debut or his lauded Before And After Science) but I've come to view them as nearly perfect on their own terms; the saxophone phrasing and gong-like cymbal puncutations in the former and the eerie treatments in the latter providing examples of Eno's knack for never wasting a detail and his superlative ability to design the perfect atmosphere for his songs. "Back In Judy's Jungle" brilliantly sets a tale of covert operations to music built around a militaristic beat that nevertheless accomodates a completely unexpected transition to a stirring chorus. The break-neck "Third Uncle" is all clipped guitars and disaffected vocals — it's basically a Talking Heads song a couple of years before that band established themselves, evidencing a shared aesthetic that likely helped draw David Byrne and Brian Eno together for their later collaborations. The ethereal, trancelike title track concludes the album. It moves slowly, but is captivatingly beautiful and has become one of my favorites on this fantastic record. A final item of note is that Eno and a friend, Peter Schmidt, developed a set of "oblique strageties" at about this time which were designed to aid artists confronted by creative blocks. Eno applied these strategies to the making of Taking Tiger Mountain and he returned to them at various times throughout his career. review by Matt P. — 12-12-06 —