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.