Brian Eno: FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE (digital outlets)

It has been some while – 17 years in fact – since Brian Eno offered a vocal album and while this is certainly that (eight songs and one instrumental, the beautiful Inclusion) it is, as so often the case with Eno, the sonic landscape he creates which seduces.

Here are echoes of his gorgeously weightless ambient works with those translucent synth passages, allusions to his marvelous Apollo album and stately piano chords.

This is therefore a slow and measured collection quite unlike those seminal Eno vocal albums of the Seventies (Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and Another Green World) which defined a new kind of intellectual art.pop.

His voice here is more intimate and deeper, and on There Were Bells he sounds more like the late Scott Walker of the Eighties and Nineties: soft, dark, melodic and utterly engaging.

And as the pleasure of the soundbeds are being assimilated we can hear the reason for this slow and measured approach: Eno is addressing the unease of these days as climate change becomes an urgent concern and Nature is in peril by the hand of Mankind.

This is an elegiac meditation with concern for the small details (on the opener Who Gives a Thought “about the fireflies/nematodes/labourers, the ones who dig and hoe . . .”) and the big picture (“These billion years will end” on Garden of Stars).

The sense of foreboding here is almost palpable but Eno also offers the gloss of beautiful music as some kind of balance. This isn't so much pessimism as pragmatism about what is happening around us: love isn't the answer but awareness certainly is, art and science are handmaidens if we are to salvage something of the planet.

By dispensing with overt percussion in favour of supple rhythmic pulses and melody as the guiding principle, the collection feels deliberately organic in its celebration and concern for the natural world which is as big as the sun or as small as “unstudied worms of no commercial worth”.

There may disaster of Biblical proportions like an approaching zombie but Eno seems to suggest that if we are on the way out then this oddly holy album might just offer some solace if not enough to provoke us to embrace the beauty around us and do our damnedest to prevent it – and us – from going out in literal smoke and fire, floods and plagues.

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You can hear and buy this album at Spotify here