Eno knows best

When an album without words is able to clearly express emotion, you know it’s good. When an album with no words expresses emotion more powerfully than many that have words, you know it’s great. Ambient innovator Brian Eno’s latest work, “Small Craft on a Milk Sea,” is one of the latter.

The first track, “Emerald and Lime,” is peaceful and calming and serves to cleanse the listener’s emotional palette, giving the subsequent tracks room to have full emotional impact. “Complex Heaven,” the second track, is ominous and beautiful, and it feels distinctly like the calm before the storm.

That foreboding intensifies in the title track. The album crescendos into unconstrained anger during the next three tracks, culminating in a minute-long guitar frenzy in “2 Forms of Anger.”

The rest of the album is a spiraling descent from that anger, moving through a gallery of brooding emotions, frenetic restlessness, dissatisfaction, melancholy, fear, mourning, anxiety and finally peace.

Eno’s uncanny ability to both express and implant emotions through his music is on full display in this very stimulating album.