Forgery League

Eno’s first disc of songs in over a decade. It does share the gentle atmosphere of its near-namesake of thirty years ago, Another Green World, but all the tracks actually do have vocals.

Eno has remarked that lyrics may be the ‘last really hard problem’ in music, as technology makes it easier to produce slick-sounding recordings. And honestly, I don’t find most of his lyrics that interesting. As with a lot of Eno’s work since about the tail end of his “rock” era, they’re generally vague and unevocative, with titles that all seem to involve “up” or “down” or “under” or “over” or “between”, and the songs themselves are along similar lines.

And musically? There’s a uniformly soft, introspective mood throughout, even to the point where the songs can blur together a bit, but it’s pleasant enough. There’s a sort of undersea feel to “Going Unconscious” that’s quite lovely, with the same eerie sense of wonder that Boards Of Canada are so good at. What goes around comes around…

“This” opens the album on a bouncy note, and were it not for the final verse (something about “this revolver / this fire / I’ll hold it up higher, higher” really bugs me, for some reason) it’d be near perfect. I keep expecting it to turn into “Paranoimia” by the Art of Noise, though… seems like a mashup waiting to happen.

“How Many Worlds” has a folk-song naivete that develops into something quite stirring thanks to a lovely string arrangement that seamlessly blends the real (frequent Eno collaborator Nell Catchpole) and the synthetic. Eno’s fascination with vocal processing continues, too: he sings in a fragile, machine-assisted falsetto on “And Then So Clear”, and the modulated voice-over on “Passing Over” has been understandably likened to a Dalek.

The creeping dread of “Passing Over” is one of the few jarring moments on the album. But the most powerful and hardest hitting track is the closer, “Bone Bomb”. Its catchy, sweetly chiming accompaniment belies the chilling words, recited by Aylie Cooke: “my body / so thin / so tired / beaten for years / ploughshare to bomb”. By a strange coincidence, Camper Van Beethoven’s latest album also closes with the song of a suicide bomber, but its platitudes about faith and the Lord fall flat. By contrast, the soft, resigned interior monologue of “Bone Bomb” hits like a punch to the gut. “Everything stolen except my bones / now I am only bone / I waited for peace / and here is my peace.”

So Eno can certainly write evocative words… maybe it’s just verse that’s the problem. Bring on more spoken stuff!