Here Come The Warm Jets

There are a few people in music that get me really worked up talking about. John Lennon is one of them. David Bowie is one of them. Noah Lennox is one of them. Brian Eno is one of them. He is who this entry is going to focus on. I first heard of Brian Eno a few years ago, as the man who wrote the Windows 95 start up sound. Last year, I got to know him better when a friend of mine introduced me to his career as a progressive rock artist with the album Here Come The Warm Jets.

The album, if you've never heard it, is simply superb. For almost exactly 42 minutes, you enter a surreal, sarcastic world of babies that are on fire, blowtorches, menacing out-of-tune piano, and vague references to urination. It struck me as great fun. I instantly loved the record. After hearing Warm Jets, I went out and got Eno's 3 other rock albums: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science. I entered an alternate Eno-verse. I instantly took a great liking to all three other albums, while only Another Green World came close to enthralling me like Warm Jets.

It starts out with the loud, shoegaze-y guitar of Needles in the Camel's Eye, a song which Eno insists has no lyrical meaning. He's said numerous times that his lyrics don't focus too heavily on telling a story, they focus on creating a stream of words that flow well together. The second song on the album, The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch, opens with Eno in a silly accent proclaiming "My my my, we're treating each other just like strangers/I can't ignore the signifcance of these changes." It is certainly one of the weirder songs on the album.

Track 3 is the epic Baby's On Fire. It seems to be about a weird photoshoot involving a burning baby. It features a spectacular guitar solo by Eno's longtime collaborator Robert Fripp, which covers the majority of the song. Track 4 is probably the most straightfoward song on the album. Cindy Tells Me has a bit of an old-time rock and roll vibe with falsetto backing vocals and piano throughout the track. On the other end of the spectrum, Driving Me Backwards is probably the weirdest track on the album. It features doubled vocals, detuned piano, and ominous lyrics.

The next track is probably my least favorite on the album: On A Faraway Beach. The vocals seem like an afterthought, as they don't appear until near the end of the track. Track 7 is Blank Frank, a song about "the messenger of your doom and your destruction" which features a rhythm similar to that of George Michael's "Faith." One thing I always found interesting was an effect that appears throughout the song that sounds as if somebody is messing with the playback on the vocals. The track after Blank Frank is Dead Finks Don't Talk which is another strange song. This song doesn't have much singing in it, it is mostly spoken-word.

Now we being reaching the end of the album with my favorite song on it, Some Of Them Are Old. It is a hymn-like song with elaborate vocal harmonies, jangly guitar, and accordion. The song ends and you hear the sound of tense bells. Then, with the slide of a guitar, the shoegaze-y Here Come The Warm Jets kicks in. The song is a 4 minute song with the only lyrics being completely inaudible.

A great thing about the album is how it keeps building up and becoming tense, then it just releases with the epic Here Come The Warm Jets.


Here Comes The Warm Jets quickly became one of my favorite albums of all time, and I plan on discussing his other albums in the upcoming entries here.

Green Rain

I've decided to create a blog about music. I guess an appropriate way to start such a blog would be to tell you a little bit about myself and my relationship with music. Music has always played a pretty big part of my life. One of my early memories is sitting in a car listening to Say It Ain't So by Weezer when I was probably 3 or 4 years old, which would be 1996. That was the first album I think I ever grew attached to - The Blue Album. It is also one of my first gifts I remember getting for Christmas, along with a small keyboard. I'll attach a recent picture of the keyboard to this post.




Growing up, I listened to music a lot. I would spend hours singing along with the Monkees, the Beach Boys, and Weezer. There was a small stereo in my room which I would put my ears right next to and pretend the band was in front of me playing live. Eventually, I decided I was interested in performing music myself. It was a little hard to really learn how to play. I grew up in a family that wasn't very musical. Nobody in my family really played any instruments, aside from my dad being able to play a few chords on the guitar. My next-door neighbor, a boy my age, and I would sit outside on his front lawn and sing songs while attempting to play the keyboard pictured above. This period went on for a while.

One Christmas, though, my friend got a guitar... and DRUMS. This was a breakthrough. We needed to learn how to play these instruments. It led to many hours banging on drums and making distortion with his grumpy, chain-smoking parents yelling at us to quiet down. During this time, I remember three songs that I "wrote." I'm using the word "wrote" rather loosely, because only one of these songs involved actual instrumental work. One was titled "Stop Messin' Around With Me," which was a bubblegum pop song similar to N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys. Another was a Linkin Park-esque "I Need a Pill." These songs were written with completely serious intentions, but looking back they are definitely more like parodies of two genres. The final song was "Lions and Dandelions." This was a folk song played over 4 chords on a guitar. (To those musicians out there, it was a D, A, B, G progression) I still remember how these songs sounded, and can still sing them when asked to. I think I have a recent recording of Lions and Dandelions, I'll attach it to this post.

Lions and Dandelions.mp3 I apologize for my singing, I must have had a bad day vocally.

Eventually, my next-door neighbor/the very naive McCartney to my equally naive Lennon moved to Georgia, and I followed a year later, moving north. At this point, I was listening to a lot of Lemon Demon, Ben Folds, and They Might Be Giants. On top of this, I was actually recording my own songs now! Most of these songs were cheap, synth-pop TMBG ripoffs with really bad singing and titles like "Mr. Onion Ring Man," "Say Hello to the Village Idiot," "Good Night, Nice Dreams," and "I Wanna Be a Jedi." Well, that was 3 years ago. I still occasionally listen to They Might Be Giants and Lemon Demon and I still record my own music, but lately I've been trying to expand my horizons musically and discover other great music out there. I guess that is what this blog is going to be about! You can find my Last.fm here. Here I'll review music, or discuss recording, maybe compare bands, or whatever.

Have a nice night!