Brian Eno & David Byrne
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

THE REVIEW

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today... so what happens?
Here are two more who, after almost thirty years (27 to be precise), feel the need to indulge in a musical reunion.
Logically, today's album has nothing to do with the fruit produced by their collaboration in '81: back then, they listened to the future through the electronic branches of the bush of ghosts, here they scout the present among the notes of an electro-gospel, aka alt-pop.
An inevitable difference, already apparent from the cover: here, where everything will happen today, everything is well-made, fake, and plastic like the little house on the cover (kudos to whoever wrote that they're returning to Virgil, the town where "True Stories" was set, and the reference to this byrnnian work is accurate, but even more accurate is the one to "Wrong Way Up" by Eno + Cale, another work that has been quietly carrying almost twenty years on its shoulders but was positioned at the time as an experiment in sublime and elegant electropop), where they lived among specters and there were shreds of pixels in a storm with apocalyptic tones.
There isn't much soul in these songs, the shamanic rage has been replaced by detached observation, there is little intent to build a sonic framework that gives sense to it all. The sound is pleasant, of course, but it never reaches an emotion that grabs you and sweeps you away. Plastic and distracted, it offers us a rather antiseptic contemplation, not even that sarcastic, never sharp.
Probably it will be a huge success.