Collection: 10. Brian Eno - Another Green World

After taking two strides away from Roxy Music with Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Eno finally created an album that crystallized his delicately subversive relationship to pop music. As Chris Ott put it in a review of the remastered edition of this album, “Eno ripped rock and roll apart, never losing sight of its precepts. No one could mistake Another Green World for anything other than a pop album, but at the same time, it is unrecognizable as such.”

This paradox is a very real one, and as listeners, we feel the intensity with which Eno combines his potent pop sensibilities with their very deconstructions. Obviously standout tracks “Sky Saw,” “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and “I’ll Come Running” take part in this paradox to a degree, but the essential Eno character lies most in the album’s unassuming (but very human) sinews. When these pockets of vulnerability are forced to bubble over—as does the almost sheepishly virtuoso guitar work on “Golden Hours,” or the warm washes of beautiful synthesizer melody on “Becalmed,” or the swaying guitar line that grows in confidence with repetition at the end of “The Big Ship”—it’s hard to imagine moments in pop music so authentically real, and so simultaneously spiritual. –Nick Sylvester / Pitchfork.com