Another Green World is where Brian Eno creeps up behind me, and whispers how all pop music is about art, how all art is about life, and life is really a vessel for pop music. Where I forget what is a song and what is not a song, and where Eno realizes you can create something at once high art, low art, and not art at all. Most importantly, Eno discovers there is more beauty and worth in the discreet nuances of subtle sophistication than in all the blunted bluster in the world.
With Another Green World Eno builds a record full of half finished pop songs distracted by the world of possibilities open to them, and instead of carrying on to their logical conclusions, they slowed, stopped and drifted off into new directions previously unconsidered. The record is dominated by synth and organ, but equally by space and silence, as minimal drones underpin compositions that end almost before they've begun. Filled with restraint and unassuming grace, the many layers of disparate instrumentation Eno weaves together leave aching gaps where echoes and shadows of sound combine to leave the listener straining at the spaces they leave behind.
This record manages to be beguiling in its enchanting, apparent simplicity. The songs still challenge, full of twists and broken promises as they turn in on themselves and threaten at any time to beak free and run amok, but here they do so with a seeming ease, never drawing attention to their subversion. Another Green World is an expression of Pop Music as Art of the highest order; it takes the palette of pop music, and paints with it a world of boundary free possibility and endless expression.
Another Green World is now re-mastered and more than ever it is sound first, music second, and art more than either. With Another Green World Eno finally found himself, an alternative to the obvious, overbearing world of pop music. The result is fourteen pop songs that are not pop songs at all, resolutely un-musical music built with blissfully musical moments of non-music. Smart, subversive, but simple, this is Pop Music the way Eno imagines it.