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BRIAN ENO
Here Come the Warm Jets
Taking Tiger Mountain
(By Strategy)
Another Green World
Before and After Science
(all Astralwerks)
Brian Eno has done such a good job of disappearing up his own obliquely strategic ass over the last 30 years that you'd be hard-pressed to remember that he was once a writer of (excellent) songs. We're far more comfortable with him as a theorist and a pundit and sound gardener—yet here are the four albums he sang on, pesky reminders of his path not taken. None of them was really ever unavailable, and the old CDs still sound fine to me. These subtle remasters are a bit like transferring an etching from a piece of rice paper to Lucite. And the music is recommended to anyone who enjoys the Beatles, Gilberto Gil, Pavement, the Beta Band, or Timbaland: self-aware but never self-conscious pop songs with twists and invisible improvisations and funny noises. Here Come the Warm Jets (1974) is the first, the glammiest, the rockingest, and the funniest. It opens with "Needles in the Camel's Eye," which takes place in an alternate universe where Sterling Morrison played with the Crickets instead of the Velvet Underground, and ends with the title track's flatulent soundtrack triumphalism. The playing is impeccable, drawing on the cream of English prog-rock, from vocalist Robert Wyatt to King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp to, um, Genesis drummer Phil Collins. Eno's own inability to play anything other than the studio (he gave musicians instructions such as "play like a Tesla coil") kept things unpredictable. Fripp's solo on "Baby's on Fire" is a series of Windsors and half-Windsors that never quite knot. Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974) is Eno's incontestable masterpiece. Some bands have spent their whole careers trying to remake "Third Uncle," pre-emptory new wave so taut it might be the thrumming of the human nervous system itself. Eno was also mastering his instrument. What's the lead voice on "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More"? A zither played with tongs? A glass xylophone? Eno melted into the studio entirely for 1975's Another Green World. This is the start of the program music, the ambient music, and all future product marked "Eno." It contains a few songs, a few flashy moments (Fripp's solo on "St. Elmo's Fire," not coincidentally the best of the songs), but mostly the album is moody synth vapor against a dark-woods backdrop. Soon after would come the ambient years (moody synth vapor as an end in itself), and his classic Bowie trilogy of Low, Heroes, and Lodger (moody synth vapor under someone else's songs). On his way there, he released 1977's Before and After Science, and no wonder it feels like an afterthought, though it contains "King's Lead Hat," his nerviest rocker, and "By This River," a dream combo of sleepy Stereolab and Arvo Part. Science is a failed masterpiece—for every "No One Receiving," matte silver funk, there's a "Here He Comes," a dull ballad. But setting the tone for the next 30-odd years of semipopular rock is a tough act to follow. JESS HARVELL
the GRIS GRIS
The Gris Gris
(Birdman)
"Gris-gris" is a New Orleans slang term for voodoo amulets or incantations that's also used as a reference to drug taking; it's also the title of Dr. John's 1968 debut, which is where this Oakland-via-Texas band's frontman, Greg Ashley, got it. Already, you have a handful of clues as to what the Gris Gris are onto—namely, they make spacey garage-rock exotica. (Think Spacemen 3 fused with Os Mutantes plus a case full of castanets.) The leadoff track, "Raygun," barely whispers as it emerges; the opening bass notes are just pitter-pats before the kick drum comes in with what can hardly be described as a kick. Once in full swing, Ashley's lament seems to come from around some distant bend, while the guitars belong to gypsies. Halfway through the eight-minute track, the distant, exotic melancholy has turned itself inside out and become a wall of feedback and noise, but Ashley returns at the very end, softly singing, "Raygun, raygun/Da da da da dum," as the song disappears. Elsewhere the Gris Gris offer straightforward Stonesian garage ("Necessary Separation"), Latin-leaning psych/pop ("Medication #3"), and the kind of humble garage-born longings that seem to have gone missing from the rough-and-tumble revival's songbooks ("Me Queda Um Bejou"). If you're inclined to need someone, you'll be glad the Gris Gris brought them back. LAURA CASSIDY
The Gris Gris play Sunset Tavern with the Cops and Invisible Eyes at 9 p.m. Fri., Aug. 27. $7.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Mento Madness: Motta's Jamaican Mento 1951–1956 (V2)
Stanley Motta invented the Jamaican recording industry. He began issuing discs of a locally brewed form of calypso—mento—in the early '50s, prefiguring ska and reggae-biz masterminds such as Clement "Coxsone" Dodd and Leslie Kong. Mento Madness collects 18 benchmarks of the style, including the country's first homemade 78 (Lord Fly's "Medley of Jamaican Mento") and its first to be released elsewhere (Harold Richardson and the Ticklers' "Glamour Gal," which appeared in the U.K. on Melodisc in 1952). Madness is no mere history lesson, though. The Jamaicans' take on calypso is every bit as diverse (R&B-ish sax here, a banjo solo there) and funny as Trinidad's. Philosophical, too—"Monkey Talk" by Hubert Porter with George Moxey & His Calypso Quintet finds said signifying animal holding evolutionary theory up to the light, concluding that Darwin got it backward: "A monkey wouldn't go home at night dead drunk/And try to pull his sleeping wife from her bunk/Neither would a monk wake his neighbors up/By smashing plates, dishes, saucers, and cups." "Glamour Gal" similarly plays the dozens, echoing Louis Jordan's "Beware" while adding complaints about bleaching cream and tricky brassieres. Monty Reynolds & the Shaw Park Calypso Band's "Me Dog Can't Bark" wryly protests antinoise laws, hinting that the government might also like to shut up poor people. Motta got out of the record game after 1956, yielding to the burgeoning tide of rockin' American sounds that fed ska. But roots fans will want to hear these excavations from his vaults. RICKEY WRIGHT
