Brian Eno - Here Come The Warm Jets Poll ~ Oh no Oh no Oh no Oh no Oh no!

also gotta disagree with Alfred here, side 2 >> side 1 although Fripp does kill it on that solo

the Dead Finks-Some Of Them Are Old-HCTWJ run is maybe my favorite half-LP-side out of all of his work

It's tough but I went with Needles. The immediate runners up are Paw Paw, Finks, Cindy, and Baby -- but they're all pretty damn great.

For me it's between Needles and Blank Frank. The former is just a great driving pop song with careening guitars while the latter has that weird calliope thing in the middle that is just too demented.

I didn't like Velvet Goldmine much, but "Needle" was used to perfect effect in it. That's kind of the only way I can elevate one of the first four songs above the rest - they're all excellent

"dead finks don't talk" for paul thompson's wonderful drum pattern and the hand claps that come in after the guitar solo in the "bless my soul" section. and yeah, the sequencing at the end is lovely. title track could be looped for hours; when the drums finally sync up it's a really nice moment.

regarding vulgarity, i once read an eno interview wherein he confirms that the title is a reference to urolagnia. but that's rather oblique in my opinion and i simply can't understand where the zappa comparisons are coming from

What can we say? The man loves his piss. Literally.

thinking about it, this album really should be ranked in terms of moments rather than songs. i agree that the blipping, chirping slide guitar on "some of them are old" is one of the strongest parts of this record. but i also think the song itself lacks momentum ("remember me" part goes on forever it seems like), and then BOOM title track kicks in and it's total bliss (similar effect when the lyrics to "baby's on fire" come in, after that interminable intro). part of me thinks that the songs being boring or hackneyed or kind half-assed in terms of pop artistry is what makes the cool moments feel so sublime. the technique is more or less inverted on "another green world" -- the long droney bits make a song like "i'll come running" feel magical, in much the same way that i'll do backflips for some bottom-of-the-barrel 1960s top 40 single after a four-hour brötzmann binge or whatever

the title track because of how the drums sneak up on you

i don't think this album is nearly as good as the two that followed it.

actually idk. i am listening to it again and some of the tracks i thought i didn't like are sounding very good.

Treats me good just like an armchair

i really think that the lines people point to that seem to suggest some kind of unsavory sexual politics on eno's part are best read in context. everybody knows the lyrics on this LP are total dada word salad free association and coupled with eno's sort of androgynous self-presentation, stuff like that "armchair" bit read more like an accidental satire of big macho rock lyrics, rather than some kind of sly pseudo-poetic misogyny-but-i'm-an-artist-haha, y'know?

Huh i always thought it was "just like an object"

Either way I always heard that libe as eno being the object/armchair

Now I've found a sweetheart
Treats me good, just like an armchair

xpost that's kind of a cool reading.

anyway, here's chrissie hynde interviewing eno in NME:

"Mexican pornography is an interesting island of thought because they seem to be heavily into excretory functions. The traditional American view is that anything issued from the body is dirty. It's incredibly puritanical and it resents bodily fluids, so if one is trying to debase a woman, you cover them with that and hence you get the fabulous term 'Golden Showers' - the term for pissing on someone, which some well- known rock musicians are said to be very involved in . .

"Here come the warm jets?"

"That's certainly a reference."

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/nmetxt.html

huh. he seems really gross and weird in that interview.

lol yeah

"the limp handshake (handshake?)"

in fairness, chrissie hynde doesn't come out looking particularly good either

20 year old me would want to kill me for saying this but:

I actually prefer Stranded to Here Comes The Warm Jets.

That being said, there are a few good tunes on here (the first two especially), but it is the weakest of his 70s vocal albums.

I voted for the title track.

Even mentioning Zappa in the same breath as Eno is 0_o

I just remembered that Adrian Belew ended up working with Bowie because Eno saw him playing at a Zappa gig in Germany. Though I believe Eno had just got free tickets and thought, what the hell I'm not doing anything else tonight.

I love Driving Me Backwards, had no idea it would be considered a weak link.

Voting for Baby's On Fire though. Intense!

Voted Dead Finks, because his Bryan Ferry impression (which sounds like he's doing Elvis) cracks me up

Listening to this now. You're all wrong about Driving Me Backwards, it's probably the best song on Side A, opening track possibly aside

Obviously TTM is the better album but you all knew that already

i had a really hard time deciding between 'some of them are old' and the title track. it's hard for me to separate the two since they work so well together.

xxp if I want overwrought howling I'll listen to a Peter Hamill record ;)

Driving Me Backwards is some crazed misanthropic ahead-of-its-time goth vamp with exceptional sonics and a thickening plot

I like it too but wouldn't single it out

Threw my vote at DMB in the end as it is so bad and hated but the bookends deserve it as much idk w/e

On Some Faraway beach is A warped version of " Still The Same" by Bob Seger

concerning the warm jets, they are on the cover. there is this game card with the policeman next to the woman in an obvious position on the beach on the left of the eno photograph.

another small little detail concerning "on some faraway beach". it was released in 1973, "still the same" is from 1978. go figure who influenced whom...

There's lots of great stuff on here. While I would choose most other tracks over Driving Me Backwards I don't consider it weak either.
It was a tie for me between On Some Faraway Beach and Dead Finks Don't Talk, went for the mighty Beach.

i see the Eno/Zappa connection. both were 70s misanthropic studio wizards that enjoyed making mutant deconstructions of rock n roll/doo wop.

What? Eno has never ever been misanthropic.

allmusic: a "self-described non-musician [...] Eno championed theory over practice, serendipity over forethought, and texture over craft"

i think eno's theory of the "study as instrument" and his reliance on people who were competent enough to actually play guitar, drums, etc. distinguish him from zappa, who was a multi-instrumentalist and very much a control freak. whereas eno's well-documented use of chance methods sort of put him an a spot that's less studio-creep, more open to improvisation or at least input from the musicians he worked with (zappa almost always got full songwriting credit right from the start -- HCTWJ, at least, is different in that respect). it's also hard to imagine eno telling his band how to behave, what drugs not to take, etc.

as for the music, i guess you can call it misanthropic? you could point me to where that is, but i've never heard it. eno himself never comes off as such in interviews. he seemed / seems to be genuinely interested in humans and all the world has to offer. isn't that so? can you even imagine zappa being involved in something like the long now foundation? eno's politics are pretty right on.

i'll give you "mutant deconstructions" i guess, but i'd argue that's being generous to zappa. more like tasteless parodies. dude had zero sense of humor and, as has been discussed at length on other threads, his lyrics are full of just super gross sexism, homophobia, and machismo that is super direct and unpleasant.

eno's music is the opposite of misanthropic

yeah budo jeru OTM - Zappa and eno are not in the same wheelhouse.

I give you all that on Eno but I feel there is a definite bitter (manipulative, vulgar, yeah misanthropic) streak to Eno maybe up until AGW. Like early Roxy and solo albums are tastier than Zappa sure, but it's not that different of a wheelhouse. Ferry had enough genuine leading man gusto to tamper it a bit and the difference after Eno left is telling. Many moments on this album make me think of Hot Rats by sounds alone but also a certain feeling of being pulled on by a bullshiter. Like, the melodies on On Some Faraway Beach and the title track are genuinely pretty but he sort of plays against them in a cheap kitschy way as opposed to enhancing them as he started doing in all his later stuff. Like it's a difference, that we were talking about during the Talking Heads poll, between early and late Byrne. The nervous hateful wreck vs a guru. Eno wore the guru better but Byrne was a much more likable wreck.

Also I agree, Zappa is a dumbass both as a person and as an artist. Still, Freak Out and We're Only in It for the Money have moments where all his miserable bullshit sort of becomes poignant (Mom & Dad comes to mind). I actually prefer those to Here Come The Warm Jets.

Think of the pretty pars of Peaches En Regalia and tell me you don't hear the similarity! But ok, can probably phrase it all better once I clear my head a bit. But again, I would probably go on a "Still the Same is a million times better than On Some Faraway Beach" rant so I should shut up forever.

parts*

i feel like these early, overstuffed albums are brimming with affirmative exuberance rather than any kind of mockery or scorn. sometimes absurdism can feel hostile, but the dada lyrics here just seem like a way to untether the songs from any single meaning, allowing the album to retain some of the improvisational energy of the recording process

Eno is a masterful self-publicist, so we should take "non-musician" for the delicious nonsense it is. He plays excellent keyboards, although perhaps not in 1973.

i spent a year of my life living completely inside this album. just about literally. fave song at beginning: "needle in the camel's eye." fave song in middle: "on some faraway beach." fave song at end: "here come the warm jets."

since there's been hardly any mention of "blank frank," i'll add that i love how the hand percussion turns around on every verse, having played through the metric changes on the instrumental interludes as if they weren't there.

Dead Finks Don't Talk is a piss-take of Ferry, right?

In hindsight, I wonder if Eno knew of 'Maggot Brain' in how on the track 'Here Come the Warm Jets' he kinda keeps the drums completely out of the mix until the last part of the tune. I'd imagine there is a drum take on the whole tune, but either it was off or it just sounded better having the guitars, bass and synth on that front half and slow mixing in the drums. How it is mixed reminds me a bit of how Clinton created the studio Maggot Brain in that way.

between this and the Talking Heads poll this has been an Olympics record-breaking month for the amount of complete bullshit wittered on ILM

“Dead Finks is not about Bryan Ferry. After all the music was recorded and the words written, Chris Thomas (my producer and Roxy’s as well) said, ‘you’ll get me shot for that track. It’s obviously about Bryan.’ So I listened back to it and it obviously was. It was certainly something I hadn’t realised. Essentially all these songs have no meaning that I invested in them. Meanings can be generated within their own frame-work. It may be a very esoteric thing to talk about but I don’t think it’s entirely out of the question.” -- Brian Eno, 1973

Surely the faux Ferry inhabitance at 1.14 in "Dead Finks Don't Talk" is the best recorded on tape

"Driving Me Backwards" from the June 1, 1974 release is far superior to that on the proper album -- Ayers' cascading basslines add some real punch to the track.

favorite Eno lyric is still "Splish splash, I was raking in the cash/The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface BUHHHHH"

It was his 70th birthday today, and I'm listening to the Warm Jets record and thinking, as much as I love his ambient work,that I would love to hear more of his singing and (lyrical) songwriting. That said, the 6-disc ambient set he released this year is great too.

Happy Brian Eno Day, all.

Happy belated birthday, Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno!

favorite Eno lyric is still "Splish splash, I was raking in the cash/The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface BUHHHHH"

Belated happy birthday, Brian!

so this was news to me

"Brian Eno recounts how he (allegedly) pissed in 'Fountain,' Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal, in his 1995 diary A Year with Swollen Appendices"

Brian Eno recounts how he (allegedly) pissed in 'Fountain,' Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal, in his 1995 diary A Year with Swollen Appendices pic.twitter.com/oUqGuB3TRb

— priscilla page (@BBW_BFF) May 16, 2018

in b4 Warm Jets joeks

warm jets jokes must have been going on for decades already?

Yeah hard to get inb4 anything here, this album title famously refers to piss and eno has two separate piss anecdotes in his diary, he’s a piss guy

Yeah I am new to Eno’s sexual proclivities sorry

Damn it, I knew I shouldn't have changed my dn this morning.

Yeah hard to get inb4 anything here, this album title famously refers to piss and eno has two separate piss anecdotes in his diary, he’s a piss guy

The album cover features a photograph of a woman peeing!

"Driving Me Backwards" is my fave (not sure if I voted here). never knew it wasn't rated/liked by others. and although I do love it Warm Jets is my least fave of the '4 vocal albums'.

as for sex, "ooo what to do in a tiny canoe" (Backwater) is my fave playful Eno sex lyric

Correct answer is some of them ate old

brutal