The Ship is a thrilling album, emotionally draining in parts, but more than worth the struggle. Forty-one years after Another Green World, Eno is still foraging for new musical ground, and what he’s able to come up with is nothing short of miraculous.
The Ship proves he has more ideas than ever, and shows there’s still plenty left to be achieved in music.
It's a stealth tour de force, philosophizing savvily, coalescing the full range of the artist's solo output into easily the most meticulously structured album he's put out in years.
Brian Eno has consistently used contemporary music to both reflect his experiences and transform his surroundings, and 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, his sixth Warp record in seven years, entwines various threads from these albums into a heady amalgam that stands as his best work for the label to date.
The Ship is a great, unexpected record. The title track and “Fickle Sun (i)” on their own and as a connected piece of music are marvelous accomplishments, distinctive in Eno’s catalog. And “I’m Set Free” immediately ranks among the most perfect-sounding pop songs Eno has ever had a hand in making.
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 breaks subtle ground by further fractalizing Brian Eno’s creative processes, taking two of his essential forms and blending them methodically into a new kind of strange pop.
Eno is always looking for that new fantasy, a look into the shadow world that's fascinated him for so long. 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.
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.
Not every experiment comes off, but when they do, The Ship is as idiosyncratic and enrapturing as anything Brian Eno has made.
Such surprises make The Ship challenging and unconventional, elements that will surely appeal to Eno's ambient fans, even if they've heard albums like it before.
His music isn't known for bearing extreme weight and uncomfortable drone motifs. The Ship is an uncharacteristically loaded LP.
Conceptually and musically The Ship attempts to dissect the experience of 2016 from the perspective of the ‘70s, so it is no wonder Eno is finding his narratives so illusionary.
Along the course of the years, ambient music has proven to be quite the distinct and complicated genre. The line that divides a masterpiece from a bland piece of music in the canon is often found to be quite thin, and no one better to prove that theory than the genre's master, Brian Eno himself. Throughout his extensive career, he has released a ton of ambient-related records, and even though there are some of which are quite fantastic and creative for their time, the veteran kept seeing his ... read more
I once fell asleep at a festival in the middle of the night listening to music to block out all the other songs, to wake up to this. Scariest moment of my life.
I wasn’t sure what to score this one, and I ended up with this. On “The Ship”, Brian Eno experiments with different auto tuned vocals. This album is similar to his very recent album, “FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE”. The Autotuned parts don’t sound great, but they’re passable. And as usual the ambiance on here is masterful. There really isn’t much to say about this record. Other than it’s a decent Brian Eno record.
Fav Tracks: Frickle Sun (ii), ... read more
I once fell asleep at a festival in the middle of the night listening to music to block out all the other songs, to wake up to this. Scariest moment of my life.
I wasn’t sure what to score this one, and I ended up with this. On “The Ship”, Brian Eno experiments with different auto tuned vocals. This album is similar to his very recent album, “FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE”. The Autotuned parts don’t sound great, but they’re passable. And as usual the ambiance on here is masterful. There really isn’t much to say about this record. Other than it’s a decent Brian Eno record.
Fav Tracks: Frickle Sun (ii), ... read more
1 | The Ship 21:19 | 62 |
2 | Fickle Sun 26:11
| 66 |
#6 | / | Fopp |
#12 | / | Uncut |
#21 | / | Louder Than War |
#25 | / | The Quietus |
#37 | / | Q Magazine |
#41 | / | Rough Trade |