I Love This Album: Brian Eno & Karl Hyde's Someday World

First, the cover:

I think we're seeing power lines strung over railroad tracks beneath a setting sun. Or maybe it's rising. That may be the Japanese flag lurking in the background. In any case, the image really caught my eye because it says something to me about what it means to be human: We build things that are at once ugly and amazing, leaving footprints all over the planet as the sun rises each day as if to remind us how small we are.

So it makes sense that the first track on the album, "The Satellites," fades in like a sunrise, shakers chirping like crickets in morning dew. When the drums kick in almost a minute-and-a-half into the song, it's like the working world is coming to life and the first hints of traffic are spilling onto the highways. No coincidence, then, that they're preceded and later accompanied by synthesized horn blasts -- a veritable symphony of road rage reflected in the song's lyrics: I need the sound of cars to drown the silent night.

 

The car motif continues in track two, "Daddy's Car": Faster than your daddy's car/Knuckles like lanterns/Laughter in the dark/The earth is turning/Faster than your daddy's car turning. Again, there's tension between nature and humanity's machinations. The world spins quickly. Time slips away. We do our best to leave an impression, but the lone and level sands always cover our tracks.

My favorite track on the album is "A Man Wakes Up." The lyrics imagine someone waking up in a confusing world with no memory of who -- or even what -- he is, but as he makes his way out into a world of broken bottles cracking beneath his feet and power lines buzzing overhead, he comes alive with joy. He may not know much about his world, but he feels in his bones that being alive is good even if it's painful. Musically, a sound akin to radio static gives this track a synthetic feel that's ultimately overtaken by a glorious female vocalist singing, A man wakes up and shines! What I hear in this transition is life triumphing over mechanization and artificiality.

Later tracks continue in a similar vein. "Witness" asks whether you've ever taken a ride only to find out that it didn't take you where you thought you would arrive. "Strip It Down" meditates on the need to simplify. "Mother of a Dog" comes across as a slow investigation into our true nature -- the idea that we're all animals sniffing around a fallen world while miracles happen all around us -- a sense that's underscored by an instrumental break about three-and-a-half minutes into the track that recalls the sunrise fade-in of "The Satellites."

As the album moves toward its conclusion, a track titled "Who Rings the Bell" opens with an industrial hum and an electro-mechanical heartbeat that almost immediately give way to an organic single-note guitar riff, leading into a sweeping vision of the secular miracles that continue to connect everyone in our industrialized world. 

Perhaps in answer to the question posed in the title of the previous track, "When I Built This World" imagines a god building a world complete with a range of flaws, not the least of which are regret, pain, and sin. The song has the feel of a voicemail message, a distant cousin of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman." But when the message ends, the music continues, and it's as if the great clock maker has wound up his creation and set it loose -- the musical equivalent of watching humanity spread across the globe in fast forward over the course of millennia. 

The album's closer, "To Us All," bears fewer overt marks of the industrialized world than previous tracks, but like many other moments on the album, it has the feel of a sunrise. Exhorting us to see the moments that we failed to seize and also to recognize the things that will happen to us all, the song evokes a sense of communion. We live in a fallen world, it implies, but that fallen world is the only world we have.

All told, Someday World describes the transcendence we find in the everyday. Yes, we've done all kinds of damage to the planet we live on -- not to mention all kinds of damage to each other -- but in the end, we're all human, and the fact that we're all here together is a miracle in and of itself.