The Ship

The Ship is delightful in every fashion. [No. 131, p.55]

The Ship proves he has more ideas than ever, and shows there’s still plenty left to be achieved in music.

Simply stated, here’s the experimental-listening event of the year.

An album that has few direct antecedents in his vast discography and arrives as a late-career landmark.

It's delightfully ponderous. [May 2016, p.48]

He’s gently guiding, minding small details as they contribute to the success of the larger mission and never forcing their emergence, Eno’s keen grasp of these two forms of songwriting allowing him to easily walk that line.

By far the most accessible and pop-sounding recordings he has recorded in years, here the ship Eno references might serve the dual function as symbolising his own soul finding tranquility in the music once again.

The Ship, his sixth Warp record in seven years, entwines various threads from these albums [Small Craft On A Milk Sea, Lux, and Highlife] into a heady amalgam that stands as his best work for the label to date.

The emotional focus sharpens as The Ship progresses.

On The Ship he has managed once again to take listeners somewhere thrilling and new, while rising to the challenge of adding another dimension to a distinctive career filled with innovation and originality.

The Ship is a memorial to and meditation on history and human foibles. Just as importantly, it places an exclamation point on Eno's career as curiosity, experimentation, chance, and form gel; his relentless sense of adventure remains undiminished by time.

The Ship successfully combines--surprisingly for the first time--his ambient and song-based work. [Jun 2016, p.73]

The Ship is a great, unexpected record.

This is magnificent. [Apr 2016, p.105]

The Ship is a strange amalgam of Eno’s familiar ambient approach with poetry--the latter delivered in a sonorous basso profundothat resonates with a sort of looming, warning warmth.

The Ship is just his latest interpretation of his vision, his constantly changing illusion, and it's also one of his most accessible albums in recent years.

Basically, this particular ambient music doesn’t lend much intellectual export or posterity that Eno so often claims to pursue. (Being slower isn’t necessarily a sign of intellectual maturity.) His approach may show it, but that’s his prerogative. Nothing wrong with staying in a mood, but this mood--whatever it is--sounds pretty played-out to me.

The Ship finds Eno’s music again foregoing the linear conventions of music and creating a kind of shapeless yet directed sound experience instead. More than that, the album is one in a long series of evidences that Eno’s limitations remain as near mythic as the man himself.

If you can get past the haughty lyrics on "Fickle Sun (ii)," for instance, then its minimalist piano notes will surely impress. And yet, even that song's musicianship sounds downright conventional compared to preceding tracks "Fickle Sun (i)" and opening track "The Ship," a 21-minute composition that begins with solemn synth moans like a distant vessel's horn.

At 21 minutes long it could do with a trim, but the closing part, a cover of the Velvet Underground’s I’m Set Free, shows that Eno remains one of the great shape shifters.

The Ship sees Eno try his hand with the darker, cinematic side of minimal, and for the most part it works. The melancholic catalysts for the record (The First World War and the sinking of the Titanic) don't transcend quite as powerfully as they could have, though.

Musically the album sees Eno experimenting with three-dimensional recording techniques, creating a sound that’s frequently panoramic and dislocating.

Not every experiment comes off, but when they do, The Ship is as idiosyncratic and enrapturing as anything Brian Eno has made.

The sprawling opening (title) track commencing with familiarly tremulous, slow-motion synths inexorably rising and falling, oscillating between exquisite consonance and transient dissonance. [May 2016, p.94]