Brian Eno - Small Craft On A Milk Sea
- Written by Kenneth McMurtrie
In most fields of endeavour pioneers, at some point or other, stop pioneering – they either redirect their energies to pastures new or settle down to churn out pale relations of their earlier work illumined by the occasional flash of past glories. Brian Eno falls somewhere in between these extremes. Having dabbled in both a number of musical areas and those of other arts throughout his career, this pioneer of Ambient is now signed to Warp, itself a pioneer in terms of labels, in what is probably seen as quite a coup by some. It certainly has a fair amount of synchronicity about it.
What, then, has the geezer with one of the longest given names in popular music brought to the table this time? With Small Craft On A Milk Sea, rather a mish-mash is the initial, short answer to that but, on repeated listening, individual tracks of the 16 do stand out a bit from their brethren. “A soundtrack for a film yet to be made” is a rather overused term in music reviewing and, whilst it’s one that doesn’t quite apply to this release, as a whole some of the better tunes exhibit an air of being lifted from a number of potential film scores.
The first three tracks pass pretty much unnoticed, although the title track reaches out with a palpable melancholia. 'Flint March', track number four, comes on like NIN circa The Downward Spiral with its breath-like sound and urgency. 'Horse' and then '2 Forms Of Anger' are similarly dark sounding, bringing to mind a swarm of malevolent bees on the one hand and going a bit Matrix tribal on the other. Unfortunately you've then got to wait for another six songs to pass before the Vangelis-like (as in Blade Runner outtake) 'Calcium Needles' comes along. It’s possibly the most minimal piece on the album but undeniably atmospheric.
'Emerald And Stone' tinkles along quite nicely, like a big sister to the Windows jingle but you'd be hard pressed to hum it afterwards. And that, with three tracks still to go, is pretty much the album over. The surprising amount of weighty guitars early on basically just gives way to music for fishtanks for the greater part of the disc's length.
