Gone to Earth

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Customer reviews

review by: The Machine date: 2009-02-09 rating:
Not his best
A few great tunes - you can hear the origins of some of his best stuff in a handful of tracks, but I'm not too keen on the country and western styles used on a few, and one or two (the title track Gone to Earth especially) is way too indulgent. br /As ever with Sylvian's stuff, it's a grower. br /Mark

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review by: date: 2008-05-13 rating:
His finest work...
This albums conjures up so many memories for me going back to the late 80s in my late teens, dark winter nights in the rain listening to this on my walkman, the times I would trance out to this album. This guy introduced me to ambient before anyone else, Eno included. The man epitimises art, a born poet. Go take that journey and buy this double album, Disc 2 would stand up alone as one of the finest ambient albums of all time, even now!! Loving that review by that chappie with his comment about Oban in Scotland. The highlands would be ideal to listen to this, it's as if he wrote it with those landscapes in mind.

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review by: BassPlayerFromRazorCuts date: 2007-06-22 rating:
Brilliant!
Everyone should own this cd! br /Everything about it is bang on! br /Booming drums on before the bullfight sound ace! br /This cd has some of the best musicians around on it they are on form!

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review by: Water Angel date: 2007-01-06 rating:
A light of empathy
Gone to earth reflects David Sylvians ability to change a everyday song into something spectacular. His use of japanese musicians and unusual background sounds blend into one to give the listener a feeling of utter joy


review by: We're all Frankies' date: 2006-05-28 rating:
1986's double album reissued
David Sylvian was clearly unhappy with the teenybop audience he found in the later years of Japan and tags like `the most beautiful man in the world.' Relationships in Japan became problematic, Sylvian was rumoured to have taken up with Mick Karn's girlfriend and was tiring of the band format - Japan having lost guitarist Rob Dean and Sylvian composing bandless-songs like "Ghosts" and "Nightporter." After a few singles with Yellow Magic Orchestra's Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sylvian experimented and eventually released Brilliant Trees that remains a watershed. 1985 saw him advance the ambient-directions of that record with Steve Jansen, Holger Czukay Jon Hassell (this work is collected on Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities). Gone to Earth was the swift follow-up, a double album whose first disc is another seven-track vocal album and whose second disc offers an ambient/instrumental work. This reissue, like the 2003-reissue replaces the dubious one-disc version released before. br / br /The album, whose title must emanate from the Powell/Pressburger film of the same name (was that from a novel?), found Sylvian collaborating with a group of revered musicians including Robert Fripp, Philip Palmer, B.J. Cole, Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor, and Bill Nelson. Observant souls will note that brother Jansen is present, as well as another former member of Japan, Richard Barbieri. In the next year, Barbieri, Jansen and Sylvian would all work with Mick Karn on the Dreams of Reason Produce Monsters album. The album as a whole feels like an advance on the climes of Brilliant Trees and is a record that sounds like a blend of Eno's On Land, Miles Davis' In a Silent Way, Scott Walker's Scott 4, and Robert Wyatt's Ruth is Stranger Than Richard. In 1980s terms it belongs to a group of albums that include Harold Budd's Lovely Thunder, Budd-Fraser-Guthrie-Raymonde's The Moon and the Melodies, Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, and The Blue Nile's A Walk Across the Rooftops. It is perhaps an overblown, over-ambitious album, but one I still listen to after all these years... br / br /The first disc of songs begins and ends on the two singles released, "Taking the Veil" and "Silver Moon". Ironically, these are the least successful tracks - the former is a wonderful guitar-driven slice of ambience, but there's not much in terms of a song. "Silver Moon" just doesn't gel for me either, it sounds like it's going to come to life, perhaps as a relative/progression of "Red Guitar" but it just feels a bit formless. Like Sylvian wanted to be Bryan Ferry but felt more Brian Eno; it's not helped by the presence of B.J. Cole, which just makes you think of The Walker Brothers' "No Regrets" - which wipes the floor with it! The rest is far greater - "Laughter and Forgetting" (a title that nods to a great novel by Milan Kundera) employs pianist John Taylor (who would work with Sylvian a few years later on the Pop Song -single) and flugelhorn from Kenny Wheeler. A gorgeous ballad that suggests the territory Sylvian would explore on the following year's "September", it eventually gives way to the epic "Before the Bullfight." This song is very much a fan's favourite and sounds like an epic extension of a song like 1984's "Nostalgia." br / br /The title track is a collaboration with Robert Fripp, dirge-like Frippertronics collide with spoken word samples - it feels slightly sinister and suggests the bleak territory of Sylvian's divorce-album Blemish. Fripp and Sylvian would regroup in the 1990s and advance their collaboration over a few tours and the albums The First Day and Damage. The highlights of this disc come next, the sublime duo "Wave" and "River Man" - mind-blowing soundscapes that exploit Sylvian's collaborators perfectly. Fripp and Sylvian would deservedly return both of these songs to on both versions of Damage. br / br /The second disc returns the original half of the album that was delegated to a few tracks on the initial single-disc version of this album. This works wonderfully as a stand-alone ambient album, continuing Sylvian's ambient career, from Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities, to the Czukay-collaborations (Flux Mutability, Plight Premonition), to the more recent Approaching Silence. Gorgeous soundscapes that leave you gasping for the greatest adjectives, and what evocative titles! : "Where the Railroad Meets the Sea" (quoted as a line on the lost Fripp/Sylvian b-side "Endgame"), "Camp Fire Coyote Country", "Sunlight Seen Through Towering Trees." An album to play alongside Budd's Lovely Thunder, Eno et al's Apollo Soundtracks, and Dead Can Dance's Within the Realms of a Dying Sun. br / br /Gone to Earth has dated wonderfully, sounding like a precursor of late period Talk Talk and showing how Radiohead should fuse the ambient, avant, and jazz. Sylvian followed it with the Walkeresque Secrets of the Beehive, though returned to this territory with the Rain Tree Crow-project, the Fripp-collaboration and parts of Dead Bees on a Cake and snow borne sorrow. An album well worth investigating, if not a masterpiece on the scale of Beehive or Trees. A bargain twin-set at this price and in this remastered form. br /

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