Pop
Drums Between the Bells (Deluxe edition)(Warp ***)
For his second album in 12 months, pop's ultimate experimentalist, Brian Eno, toys with something rare within his catalog: poetry. Texts have specked his work since the beginning of his solo career, but Eno mostly has shied away from words as roadblocks to his walls of sound.
Here, with the collaboration of impres- sionistic poet Rick Holland and a handful of (mostly women) singer-speakers whose voices remain either dryly unadulterated or get weirdly morphed, Eno throws sound and visions around like a salad spinner. As the readers rant quietly about urban spaces and the sciences, Eno provides frisky ambient music, a form of word jazz that dabbles somnolently in chamber classicism, Exotica, and Krautrock as the texts move from background to foreground and back again. "The Real" grows more hypnotic through its repetitions of noise, vocals, and ideas ("real runs out and seems to see the real as it runs"). Eno, too, finds his own brand of seduction while speak-singing "Breath of Crows," as Holland's words embrace a god that "grows and shrinks with nature's wish." Eno ain't Barry White, but he's shockingly close. A gorgeous and daring work, even