ANOTHER GREEN WORLD

In art, literature and music, the things I like most are the ones which make me ask myself questions I'll hardly find an answer to. That goes for this album too: "Another Green World" shows how its author focused on expanding the possibilities of the sound tablette of rock, "digesting", processing and reinventing simple melodies, in a minimal context. So, the prog listener will not find long epics or complex virtuosism (well, to be honest, some good bass line in "Over Fire Island"), but a quest directly in the heart of music, following a path trodden also by some advantgard Krautrock combos (Neu!, Faust and Can, above all). By doing so, Eno co-operated in planting the seeds of things to come: dark new wave (In Dark Trees), Berlin-era Bowie (the opener Sky Saw), Euro-electrowave (Spirits Drifting would fit any album by the Ultravox), ambient (Zawinul/Lava), 1980s American songwriters (St Elmo's Fire really reminds me of 1980s Tom Waits), post-rock and post-punk (The Big Ship... and I think that The Strokes would pay through their noses to make a tune like Sombre Reptiles their own). Therefore this album sounds like a sort of "Big Bang", or a prophecy if you like, or even a bridge between different eras of rock music... and here comes (the warm jet? no...) the question: if Eno is prog rock, where can the boundaries of prog rock be found? Are there any? The question rises every time I listen to this album, but at the same time I lay back and listen to the emotional soundscapes of "Becalmed" and the pure poetry of "Everything merges with the night" and in the end I tell myself: "Should I really care?"