Here Come the Warm Jets

iTunes Review

More outrageous than Bowie and flashier than Bolan, Brian Eno presented himself as one of the most outlandish stars of the glam rock era. Though he moved like a rock star during his tenure with Roxy Music, many fans no doubt wondered exactly what this strange vampiric looking knob twiddler was actually doing on stage, as he played no conventional instruments and boasted frequently of his musical amateurism. All such queries would be lain aside in 1974 when Eno released Here Come The Warm Jets the first in a series of deliriously fractured pop records whose revolutionary sounds would turn rock music on its ear. Even today, the opening blast of “Needle in the Camel’s Eye” sounds like a message from the future, with its layered guitar tracks phased into dreamy oblivion underlying Eno’s sinister croon. Though Eno himself was a musical amateur, he directs his handpicked team of collaborators, including King Crimson’s Robert Fripp and a large part of Roxy Music’s lineup, with visionary boldness, placing jarring moments of virtuosity amidst a madman’s collage of found sounds and treated effects. Yet for all of Eno’s experimental brio, the music here, from the loungey swing of “Cindy Tells Me” to the excoriating dirge that is “Baby’s on Fire, is unabashedly pop. Sweetly accessible and yet musically adventurous, Here Come The Warm Jets is one of the most important records of the early seventies.