eno / hyde - someday world

There's a new album from Brian Eno and Karl Hyde - Someday World.

And it's terrific.

Lots of quirky, jumpy tunes, filled with busy percussion, weird guitar sounds, quirky keyboard sounds, just loads going on to grab and hold your interest. Karl takes most of the lead vocals, but I rather like his voice - and his 2012 album Edgeland is both well worth getting, and is also something of a precursor to Someday World, although generally rather more tranquil.

Most of the songs here, and they are all songs, began as Brian's Beginnings. He reckons he has thousands of interesting beginnings of songs all stored in his archive, but doesn't know how to end them. This is the same process that he went through with David Byrne a few years ago. He sent Byrne loads of beginnings of tracks and Byrne finished them off. That album was recorded by sending files across the ocean, and DB and BE didn't actually meet up until the very end. This time however, once Karl had selected suitable tracks Eno and Hyde and a small band got together in Eno's studio to work them up into actual songs, with real musicians contributing as a band and vocals / lyrics being created on the spot. It does actually sound quite a 'live' record in places, which makes a nice change.

Interesting bunch of musicians on this record too - some old Eno hands like Leo Abrahams and Nell Catchpole, charmingly daughter Darla Eno sings backing vocals and the ever wonderful Andy Mackay contributes saxophone on a couple of songs (though the busy mix doesn't really allow for Andy to sound terribly Mackay-like, which is a shame). However, the main collaborator with Brain and Karl was 20 year old Fred Gibson - Eno met him a few years ago when a friend brought his son and his mate Fred round to Eno's studio. Very quickly Eno realised that Fred knew more about many of Eno's computer programs than Eno himself did. Fred apparently has a huge archive of unreleased tracks (just like Eno) and Eno reckons they are very original and unusual. So Eno co-produced the record with Fred Gibson! Not bad for a 20 year old.

There's a couple of weaker tracks, but on the whole the album is absolutely top. Some of the songs take a few spins to worm their way into your brain, but once there, they really stick. "Strip It Down" is my current favourite, especially the instrumental part that kicks in about a minute from the end. Gorgeous stuff. "Who Rings The Bell" is another that really wraps it's tune around your brain. "The Satellites" and "Daddy's Car" are a stunning one-two punch to open the album, but the record closes with an equally strong piece called "To Us All" which is lovely, and one of the most gentle tracks here. Most of the songs are more frantic, busy, bustling, ever shifting musical landscapes, with constantly twisty-turny vocals and unexpected changes of direction. For example "When I Built This World" starts off all stately and grand with a vocodered Eno vocal then shifts up a gear in the middle section and gets kinda funky.

I bought the 2cd special edition, but be warned - this extra disc only contains 4 tracks, a total of just 15 minutes. And the first two tracks are rather throwaway. But the final one, "Titian Bekh", is a lovely calm ballad of a piece. It's one of those tracks that makes little impression on first listening, but is rapidly climbing up my list of favourites every time I hear it.

All in all, it's a very impressive album, and one which welcomes a lot of plays.

They played a session for Lauren Laverne on BBC 6 Music recently, which proved that they could easily take this album on the road if they so wished. The tracks they performed sounded terrific live - "Do you have any plans to tour this album?" asked Lauren. "We have lots of plans", replied Brian, "there's always lots of plans…" but he wouldn't be any more specific than that. It sounded, sadly, most unlikely that there would be any live shows, which is a shame, but not surprising.  

Also a cracking performance on Later... with Jools Holland this week. With a band this good, they really should tour properly.