For the most part I think I like Brian Eno best as a collaborator, pushing the projects of the people he works with to surprising heights, helping each in turn find the personal Eno deep within, whether that's Roxy Music, David Bowie, David Byrne, the Walkabouts, or whoever. In his solo ventures, however, I find myself opting, track by track, for the rockers more than the soundscapes—even if one of my favorite albums by him, Another Green World, is all soundscape. One of the most delightful paradoxes about Eno is that you can never entirely make up your mind about anything. There is always a new wrinkle for everything. What that meant for this list, forced to pick just one song, was a choice between "King's Lead Hat" and this, both of which amp up the tempo and push electric guitars out front. It was not an easy choice but I settled on "Third Uncle" as much as anything because the album from which it comes, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), is so thoroughly charming and deserving of as wide an audience as possible. "Third Uncle" is a basic frontal assault, Eno style, with a rubbery bass catalyzing a convulsive choked-off electric guitar thrash and tom-heavy drumming, and very quickly propelling the dynamics directly into your face. Eventually the gnomic Eno enters the fray with a rhyming, mumbling stream-of-consciousness chant that feels nearly perfunctory. That ends on "then there was you," which appears to signal the point where Phil Manzanera can start pealing off dragways of a lyrical solo that is en toto all rawk all right. In fact, the whole thing is a kind of study in electric guitar, and in its way feels, by the manner in which it proceeds, almost like something by Erik Satie.
but what do those lyrics mean??
ReplyDeleteIt is about PTSD and a crises of recovering a suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse by "Third Uncle."
ReplyDeleteInvents the Wedding Present.
ReplyDeleteThe description of the musical mechanics for Eno's Third Uncle' might be sound enough in Jeff Pike's mind's eye. however, to say the brilliant sharp, cut down lyric is delivered matter of fact is to miss the mantra that can't even occupy any place or pigeon hole, in fact, nor can it be thought of as a song, or a melody or a conventional piece of music, but neither is it avant garde or speculative, Eno's third uncle is the sprite with a bright and strange new light on your thinking... he's the one that urges rebellion and new paths to take you could barely have envisaged without his smiling intervention. And the insistence of the piece as a whole is almost like a voice repeated again and again a strange bizarre SOS to the listener, even a wake up call to change our perspectives, to find our original way through our lives even...The third uncle is all you haven't yet explored, and the joker in a pack you haven't considered yet. Sheer genius, and the name Eno refers to this very rebellion and insistence to be all that is not, or could not be imagined by ones parents.
ReplyDeleteMinimalism on speed.
ReplyDelete