Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets (1974)

Why are you yelling at me, Brian Eno? The featured sound of "Here Comes The Camel's Eye" is an over-produced, heavily reverbed alternative rock track with completely drowned out vocals, to the point I can't understand a single word. But Mr. Eno is singing quite loudly. So why did he mix the vocals so poorly?

What the fuck is "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch"? Aside from the goofy honky-tonky backing track, Eno clowns around with the barest trace of melody, and I'm not even sure he said any of the title words in the actual song. The song is overdubbed with "zany" synthesized sound effects that in the middle third come front and center, drowning out whatever the band was doing at the time.

My quick sense of Brian Eno from this album is he wants to be David Bowie. He has a similar tenor range and from the cover photo is really into the glam scene. Of course only one person can be David Bowie and everyone else is going to look like a cheap imitation. So Mr. Eno has adopted a more silly approach with a nasally voice and harsher lyrics. Unfortunately thus far he forgot that David Bowie isn't all flash and glam, he's also an endlessly talented musician. Bowie also has a ton of charm and charisma. Nothing of the sort is coming across on Here Come The Warm Jets.

I'm probably being unfair to Brian Eno by comparing him so unfavorably to David Bowie. If I focus just on the music- the chord changes, the arrangments, the melodies- everything is pretty good for mid 70s glam-rock. What I can't ignore is how needlessly goofy and noisy the proceedings are. There's a lot of extra sounds dubbed into each song that might be an attempt to sound psychedelic and sci-fi at the same time. I found them distracting.

OK, now to be completely unreasonable... "On Some Faraway Beach" is the kind of "epic" emotional instrumental I might write in my head in high school. It's got a sad piano loop that repeats the same 8 bars over and over. On each repetition the song gains another level of counter-melody from a new instrument. The difference between me and Brian Eno is in high school I realized my version of this type of song was vapid and musically hollow. It's also tough to take Brian Eno's version seriously when most of the rest of his album has been silly junk.

I went back and forth between hating this album and just not liking it. It's in cases like this where I wish I had a rating for "kinda hated it". But I can't just start adding new forms of rating so late in my project. That would be unfair to the albums I already either flate-out hated or simply didn't like. So I'll be fair and give Here Come The Warm Jets 1 star. ... No, I'll give it 2 stars. There were actual positives, they just didn't result in something I even kinda liked.