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Despite having made eight albums of his own, Daniel Lanois still gets his bulk of praise for the records he produced for others, specifically those that went on to achieve superstar status: U2’s The Joshua Tree, Peter Gabriel’s So, and Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind. Whether the legacies of those artists, specifically U2, would have persevered this long if not for Lanois’s deft touch early on is up for debate.
What cannot be argued is the songwriter’s keen ear for studio space and how best to exploit it. Flesh and Machine is his first album to delve this deeply into ambient rock since he played guitar on a pair of Brian Eno releases in the early ’80s. (Later, in 1984, the duo produced U2’s The Unforgettable Fire.) Lanois hasn’t forgotten that period. The Eno influence persists, but this time the guitar is front-and-center, distorted and manipulated throughout.
Unlike his earlier ambient dabblings, Flesh and Machine takes a while to enter its gentler phase. “The End” is an apt title for the second song, its turbulent feedback and crashing drums erupting into sudden chaos before bleeding into a more meandering, synthy pace. “Fundamentally, my work has melancholy in it,” Lanois told me in June 2013, while working on what was then titled You Are Wonder.
Flesh and Machine bends something sinister into something sweet, unloading a toolbox of Lanois’s effects and experimentation: his heavy processing of piano on “Iceland”; his steel-guitar warp of “Space Love”; his weaving of animal and human sounds on “Sioux Lookout.” In its own, eerie way, the record exhibits what often goes overlooked about its creator: an ability to crush walls with dense simplicity. And then, just as easily, Lanois rebuilds, constructing the final song, “Forest City,” on a single, endless note.
