Another Green World

Music and lyrics[edit]

Another Green World represents a turning point in Eno's musical career. While his previous albums contained quirky rock songs, only five of the fourteen tracks on the album have lyrics.^[5] Critic Ian Wade of The Quietus noted that the album is "much calmer" than Eno's previous works, "with the avant smoothed into a new pastoral ambient pop and Eno singing on only five of its 14 tracks".^[9] Music critic Jim DeRogatis called it an "ambient/art-pop classic".^[10] According to eMusic's Richard Gehr, the album's music veers from the guitar-oriented experimental rock of Eno's 1974 albums Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) to the synth-oriented ambient minimalism of his subsequent work.^[11] Its minimalist instrumentals are scattered among more structured art-rock songs.^[12] According to AllMusic's Steve Huey, most of the album has "paced instrumentals that, while often closer to ambient music than pop, are both melodic and rhythmic", and are accompanied by few pop songs, including "St. Elmo's Fire", "I'll Come Running", and "Golden Hours".^[13] The instrumental tracks explore a new kind of sound that is more quiet and restful, marking the change between Eno's earlier rock songs and his later instrumental works in which texture and timbre are the most important musical elements.^[5] Dave Simpson described the album as creating a "largely song-based electronic pop",^[14] while AllMusic's Jason Ankeny described it as an art rock album.^[15]


"Sky Saw" opens the album with the instruments constantly changing structure, except for one of the two bass parts which plays the same pattern throughout.^[16] Eno has re-used differently mixed instrumentations of "Sky Saw" for a track for Music for Films and a song for Ultravox's debut album which he would later produce.^[17] "Songs like 'The Big Ship'", writes Mike Powell, "start on A and linger, accumulating countermelodies, magnifying themes, staying the same and yet revealing new sides with every turn."^[18][19] "In Dark Trees" and "The Big Ship" are two songs on which Eno plays all the instruments, namely the synthesizer, synthetic percussion and treated rhythm generator. The pulse of these songs is provided by the repeated rhythm coming from the rhythm box.^[20] These instrumental pieces and others like "Little Fishes" have been described as "highly imagistic, like paintings done in sound that actually resemble their titles".^[13]


To create the lyrics, Eno would later play the backing tracks singing nonsense syllables to himself, then taking them and forming them into actual words, phrases and meaning.^[21] This lyric-writing method was used for all his vocal-based recordings of the 1970s.^[22] The tracks that do feature lyrics are in the same free-associative style as Eno's previous albums.^[5][13] The humour in the lyrics has been described as "less bizarre than gently whimsical and addled".^[13]

Works cited