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This was Brian Eno's fourth and final solo album of the 70s with vocal tracks. In fact, as an artist, Eno would not return to the pop music format again, until his 1990 collaboration with John Cale, Wrong Way Up. When one listens to this, one can get a feel for why. The energetic, spastic nuggets that were most successfully mined on Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) had run their course. "King's Lead Hat" and "Backwater," with their punky aesthete and overtly non-sensical lyrics, sound rather forced and predictable by this time. They come off as little more than Eno regressing, when he had really shed this particular skin with his previous album, Another Green World. Still, "No One Receiving" and "Kurt's Rejoinder" make up some territory. The former acts much like "Sky Saw" from Another Green World, as the album opener with odd timbres and funky interplay. The latter features some superb, fearless fretless from Percy Jones, and the incidental croonings of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. The introspective pieces, by contrast, are uniformly, across-the-board brilliant. Each is like a kayak, in which the listener can paddle slowly alongside the promising vistas first set forth on Another Green World. "By This River," co-written and performed with Cluster's Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, has got to be one of Eno's most haunting pieces. Enigmatic, minimalist...a genuine spine-tingler. "Julie with" drifts along lazily, matched equally by the sleepy, mystery of "Energy Fools the Magician," "Through Hollow Lands," and "Spider and I." Perhaps the most uneven of Eno's vocal albums, and a clear step down coming from Another Green World, but top-notch nonetheless. review by Joe McGlinchey — 2-27-01 —