Brian Eno HERE COME THE WA(LP)

By the time Brian Eno left Roxy Music and came to record this masterpiece of a debut in 1973, he already held in his grasp the raw tools to revolutionize popular music. HERE COME THE WARM JETS is bathed in his singular pop-with-a-wink aesthetic and free-associative imagination. Whether on the four-on-the-floor pre-punk stomp of "Needles In The Camel's Eye" or the Spector/VU trad-rock-ism of "Cindy Tells Me," the album displays an unabashed love of quirky, catchy pop. Macabre lyrics often subvert the melodies, a feature fully expressed on "Baby's On Fire," where the singer's cheeky vocals exaggerate the theme's comic ambiguity.On two quite different pieces--the closing title-track and "On Some Faraway Beach"--a different side of Eno was laid bare. These mid-tempo, mostly wordless sound-paintings construct melancholy scenes out of grandiose, manipulated sounds, and gesture toward Eno's role as the father of ambient music. Savage guitar lines, erratic synthesizer, and pounding drums (Robe