Discography: Brian Eno: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

According to most press reports and historical records, lyrics were not the primary consideration of Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Eno’s third album after leaving Roxy Music and second on which he holds sole title billing. Eno and his confederates wrote the music first, to which Eno sang nonsense syllables until he figured out proper words. Yet the lyrics on this album, full of ominous references, scabrous characters and questionable terminology, inspired the names of at least two later bands: post-punk groovers A Certain Ratio (“The True Wheel”) and ’90s post-hardcore outfit Burning Airlines (“Burning Airlines Give You So Much More”). It’s fitting that a 1974 album defined by counterintuitive maneuvers and questionable provocations would have its least considered element inspire two bands far apart in time, scene and sound from each other.

It probably helped that a member of Eno’s backup players was himself part of a band far removed from Eno in style, if not in time or space. Tiger Mountain bassist Brian Turrington came from a pub rock band called the Winkies, who’d caught Eno’s ear as he was wrapping up his solo debut, Here Come the Warm Jets. The pub rock scene in England, as the name suggests, championed a return to bluesy, no-frills rock — essentially a reaction to the synthetic predilections and general flamboyance of glam. While the Winkies stood out from their primitive peers with a modicum of flash, they still formed a marked contrast to the splashy aesthetics of Eno’s sound, which probably explains why he took them on his one-and-only solo tour, which was regrettably cut short when he suffered a collapsed lung. While Tiger Mountain, like its predecessor, features an array of ex-bandmates (Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay) and like-minded confederates (Robert Wyatt, engineer Rhett Davies, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, Phil Collins), the inclusion of Turrington feels like part of a determination to shake things up.

Disruption seems to have been on Eno’s mind. His pneumatic injury and hospital stay had led him to reconsider his classically trained, avant-garde past and how he could venture outside of conventional pop structures. Besides hiring a pub-rock bassist, Eno, with his artist friend Peter Schmidt, devised a system to instigate the flowing of creative juices, writing unusual directives on a set of cards, to be drawn at random and followed to the letter. Eventually published as Oblique Strategies, these cards mixed the open-ended wisdom of Confucian sayings with the illogical whimsy of the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. A few sample Strategies: “Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action; incorporate”; “Go outside. Shut the door”; “Reverse the tape.” While some of these directives may seem basic to modern readers, they appear to have helped Eno, for the moment at least, satisfy his more eccentric yearnings while making what would essentially be his last full rock record.

For all its screwy flourishes, cryptically perverse lyrics and generally off-putting vibes, Tiger Mountain is inarguably Eno’s most polished pop effort, with succulent hooks, bursting melodies and toothsome textures. Opening track “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More” immediately commands the stage and charts a course, just as “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” did on Here Come the Warm Jets. Instead of a fist-pumping anthem, however, it’s choppy, almost lurching, the syncopated bass supporting a wonky main guitar riff that sounds like a detuned descending and ascending scale, accompanied by stunted rhythm guitar probably played by Eno, not a musician known for his technical skills. But, like John McLaughlin’s forcedly amateur playing on Miles Davis’s “In a Silent Way,” it’s exactly what’s needed for the job.

Eno’s vocals are much higher in the mix than on Jets and have even more of the compressed echo effect that was his signature at the time. While “Camels” used Eno’s voice as just another instrument, on “Burning Airlines” he’s actually singing a narrative, relating a story about someone named Regina who’s flown to Asia (or far Cathay in Eno’s antiquated phrasing). Supposedly, this song was inspired by the crash of a Turkish passenger jet near Paris in 1974, though what that has to do with China and what that betokens of Regina’s fate remain mysterious. And, despite all that, Eno’s vocals retain an instrumental quality — but instead of adopting the higher register and rapid-fire tempo of the guitar, he’s now more attuned to the low, steady plod of the bass.

Other tracks make effective use of similarly interlocking rhythms, well-defined verses and sculptural guitars and synths — the noir-tinged “Fat Lady of Limbourg,” with its tale of surreal skullduggery given extra atmosphere by a stiffly robotic sax line from Mackay; the martial waltz of “Back in Judy’s Jungle,” a lysergic ode to war and/or military testing, which finishes as a cracked drinking song; the mechanistic glory of “The Great Pretender” — perhaps Eno’s greatest pop achievement — with its cyborg-cricket chirps, drum-machine rattle, bucket-y percussion and hallucinatory treated guitars, whose lyrics seem to detail some form of unnatural sexual congress. All these facets might sound forbidding or strange on paper, and they definitely are, to an extent. But they’re also eminently, exceedingly hummable.

Many critics have pointed out the influence of doo-wop on the poppier side of Tiger, but it’s an inspiration filtered through the legacy of British Anglican hymns — think the serene harmonies of the Zombies. Tiger is rife with rich harmonies, often provided by Wyatt, whose multi-octave command and ringing falsetto lend a little sunshine to the florid murk of Eno’s constructions. “Very few things can’t be improved by adding either backing vocals or oyster sauce,” Eno wrote in his diary, and he certainly proved the first part of that assertion on Tiger. Whether it’s the achingly crystalline layering on “Burning Airlines” or the cheerleader chorus that enlivens “The True Wheel,” Eno uses backup singers as vivid color, giving his compositions an arresting sheen and a slightly unnerving power.

Critically and commercially, Tiger Mountain did not fare exceptionally well. Its darker lyrical themes and more fragmentary rhythms confused a public looking for more hedonistic anthems from the guy who brought you Warm Jets. The change in tone must have been hard to overcome. Going from the sneering rave-up of Jets’ “Baby’s on Fire” to the nightmare pipe-organ lullaby of “Put a Straw Under Baby” (sample lyric: “There’s a brain in the table/ There’s a heart in the chair/ And they all live in Jesus/ It’s a family affair.”) had to have been jolting. But underneath all the surface weirdness, Eno’s pop instincts were sharper than ever, and as time has lent perspective, the distinctly squeamish majesty of Tiger Mountain has begun to be more greatly admired.

And it not only marks the apex of Eno’s short career as a pop songwriter — it also contains more than a few hints of where he was to go, both as a musician and a producer. The impeccably named “Third Uncle,” later memorably covered by Bauhaus, has a jittery, Brutalist propulsion and frantic monotony that anticipates postpunk before punk, and “China, My China” has a gloriously sticky, chopped-up guitar interlude seemingly spliced in from an entirely different jam (very likely an Oblique Strategy at work). “The True Wheel,” meanwhile, finds Eno declaiming in a dorkily dramatic style similar to David Byrne, whom he would later help become a superstar with his production work for the Talking Heads.

Knowing the future of his career, it’s easy to hear Eno losing interest in traditional songwriting on Tiger Mountain, as he undertakes increasingly elaborate ploys to keep himself entertained. Despite or because of Eno’s growing pop ambivalence, the album has an enigmatic power that remains startling. It’s like watching someone create outlandish and intricate devices to squeeze the last remaining drop of sweet, sweet liquor from some ungainly fruit. The album closes with its title track, a surprisingly gentle wash of piano and reassuringly normal-sounding, delicately strummed guitar. There’s more than a little air of farewell to it, as if Eno were bidding adieu to his stormy efforts to keep his old rock ‘n’ roll animal alive. The song is almost half over before anyone sings a word.