Sources from Nexis
editNot rich pickings, but...
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
December 14, 1995 Thursday Late Edition
Hunters & Kuepper collect great past presents
BYLINE: Shaun Carney
SECTION: GREEN GUIDE; Rock; Pg. 40
YES, this is an album by the members of U2 and the band's regular producer, Brian Eno, but don't expect Zooropa II.
Passengers is a heavily Eno-esque collection of atmospheric tone poems that veer from forgettable background noise (the pulsing film soundtrack-by-numbers, Always Forever Now) to brilliant songs (Slug, with vocals by Bono in his best tranquilised singing style).
The track that has understandably won most attention is Miss Sarajevo, the title track from film maker Bill Carter's documentary about a Bosnian beauty contest, in which Luciano Pavarotti shares the vocals with Bono.
Once you get past the gimmick of the world's leading tenor singing with the world's leading band, Miss Sarajevo can be seen for what it is: a powerful piece and a wonderful song.
All up, Passengers contains a lot of interest.
The New York Times
November 19, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Pop Briefs
BYLINE: By JON PARELES
SECTION: Section 2; Page 38; Column 3; Arts and Leisure Desk
Among true recording-studio obsessives, songs are just a framework for sonic hanky-panky, and sometimes songs are just too confining. Brian Eno and U2, calling themselves the Passengers, spent seven weeks concocting "Original Soundtracks 1," a collection of sketched songs and free-form instrumentals that peek inside the workings of recent U2 and Eno efforts. For the songs, Bono stays quiet and smoky-voiced; "Your Blue Room" harks back to the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes"; "Miss Sarajevo" features Luciano Pavarotti singing about amore; "Slug" mixes shimmering echoed guitars with swampy electronic rhythms, and "Elvis Ate America" is a rhymed free association over choppy percussion.
Throughout the album, what matters is texture: the ethereal electronic tinkling of "Ito Okashi" (with a vocal in Japanese by Holi), the raindrops and barking dogs behind the cellolike melody in "Theme From the Swan." Liner notes (by the anagrammatic Ben O'Rian) describe the films associated with the soundtracks; some don't exist.
The Washington Post
November 19, 1995, Sunday, Final Edition
NEW RELEASES: POP
BYLINE: Mark Jenkins
SECTION: SUNDAY ARTS; Pg. G13; NEW RELEASES: POP
Passengers is U2 plus Brian Eno but minus songcraft, pretending to be scoring various "imaginary movies" so that the vagueness of the resulting music becomes part of the concept. Continuing in the jet-setter mode that has made U2 so annoying in recent years, the "loose collective" enlists hip-hopper Howie B., Japanese singer Holi and Italian opera star Luciano Pavarotti for one track each. Adding the latter's voice to "Miss Sarajevo" is a pretentious and musically ineffective notion, but the track is one of the few here that qualifies as an actual song, and even it meanders casually for more than five minutes. Most of the other compositions marry buzzing, chiming atmospherics and aimless funk in a manner that will be familiar to those who've heard other tossed-off Eno collaborations. "Don't want to lose my shirt/ Don't want to dig the dirt/ Don't want you to get hurt," natters Bono in "Slug," a song that concludes, "Don't want to be a slug," but "Soundtracks" is seldom anything more than high-tech slug music.
The Independent (London)
November 3, 1995, Friday
'Temples of Boom is a vastly inferior release, lacking the musical spark and lyrical imagination of its predecessor'
BYLINE: Andy Gill
SECTION: POP; Page 12
The Passengers in question are Brian Eno and U2, taking a day trip away from the more commercial imperatives of the latter's albums, with a little help here and there from turntable-scratcher Howie B, of Mo' Wax fame, and tenor singer Luciano Pavarotti, of mo' food fame.
These 14 pieces were ostensibly recorded for a selection of international films which, if not completely apocryphal, are hardly likely to play widely outside the ICA. Eno, of course, is a Music for Films veteran of more than two decades standing, and he's brought his usual working methods to tracks such as "Slug" and "United Colours", arranging blocks of sound into a semblance of emotional order without any attempt to replicate "real" instrument sounds, with all their back-catalogues of associations.
Since, as usual in incidental music, the themes rely mainly on warm-bath moods and textures rather than more hard-edged specifics, it's all a bit amorphous and open-ended. Bono's lyrics, too, are more impressionistic than he would use in U2, whether sung in a strained falsetto ("Your Blue Room") or a gentle murmur ("Slug"). Only the Pavarotti/ Bono duet "Miss Sarajevo" develops a significantly formal structure; not surprisingly, it's the track chosen as a single.