Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN (BY STRATEGY), Brian Eno's sophomore solo outing, is a grab bag of freaky, science-fiction-dipped confections. Filled with a battery of innovative, unsettling effects, the album is darker and more complex than HERE COME THE WARM JETS. The artist shows an increasing willingness to experiment with texture, as on "The Great Pretender", whose whirling, oozing keyboard line and synthesized vocals approximate delirium tremens or a hatching hive of maggots, or on "Put A Straw Under Baby", which features the Portsmouth Sinfonia, whose members have no knowledge of their instruments.
Yet Eno's grasp of melody and songcraft is everywhere: on the bouncing, absurdist/philosophical "Burning Airlines (Give You So Much More)", and on straight-out rockers, like the deliciously intense "Third Uncle" (which is propelled by the churning guitar of Roxy Music's Phil Manzenera, and is, arguably, the album's highlight). Concurrent with David Bowie's ALADDIN SANE-era alien aesthetic, Eno's tunes are even more otherwordly and warped than his glam cohort, making use of the full palette of bizarro synthesizer effects and creepy-cheeky postures. The songs, however, are as inventive and appealing as their treatments, and make for Eno's most solid--and experimental--pop album. TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN holds up magnificently, even years on in the artist's brilliant career.|

Continuing the twisted pop explorations of Here Come the Warm Jets, Eno's sophomore album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), is more subdued and cerebral, and a bit darker when he does cut loose, but it's no less thrilling once the music reveals itself. It's a loose concept album -- often inscrutable, but still playful -- about espionage, the Chinese Communist revolution, and dream associations, with the more stream-of-consciousness lyrics beginning to resemble the sorts of random connections made in dream states. Eno's richly layered arrangements juxtapose very different treated sounds, yet they blend and flow together perfectly, hinting at the directions his work would soon take with the seamless sound paintings of Another Green World. Although not quite as enthusiastic as Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain is made accessible through Eno's mastery of pop song structure, a form he would soon transcend and largely discard. ~ Steve Huey