BRIAN ENO レコード& CD

Review: Last year, Brian Eno served up his latest critically acclaimed album in the form of FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE. Now he follows it up with the much anticipated instrumental version. Despite his advancing years and the sheer scope of what he has already accomplish dint he ambient world - not least devising the genre in the first place - Eno still manages to excite and intrigue here. The artwork alone is beautiful, and the music inside is similarly lush - widescreen cosmic soundscapes with subtle melodies and shifting timbres, pregnant empty space and a knack for sounds designs with meaning few others can match.

Review: Though he was already in our top 10, 'Foreverandevernomore' might just be the album that makes Brian Eno one of electronic music's top 5 greats. Reflecting on the conundrum that is Earth's increasingly precarious climate, it for the first time ever features Eno singing on nearly every one of the featuring 10 tracks. Briefly, we need to fall in love again, but this time with Nature, with Civilization and with our hopes for the future, opines Eno. The sonic manifestation of this is a blue, metallic drone album that pits influences as far back as Greek mythology against those as modern as aviation, sonically reconciling old and new.

Review: Given 'Africa' has been the soundtrack to university athletics union night's out for the last 40 years or so it's safe to say Toto are a band that really deserve more in-depth attention. As this mind-blowing soundtrack to the cult science fiction film Dune goes to show, there's a lot more to the outfit than the chart-friendly glam-riffdom of their most famous single.



Brian Eno's name gives a sign of how arty things get, but in truth he's only responsible for a fraction of this adventurous listen, which is packed with movie soundbites to set the scene among fantastical landscapes, rather than realism. From classical overtures ('Leto's Theme', 'Trip To Arrakis'), through tense incidentals ('The Box') and crystalline synthdom ('Prophecy Theme'), it's only really on the credit-worthy 80s pop balladry of 'Take My Hand' that we get the stadium payoff Toto fans are used to, completing an epic journey.