David Sylvian's album Gone to Earth turns 40 and gets read as post-rock

David Sylvian's second solo album, Gone to Earth, has turned 40, and The Quietus has used the anniversary to argue that a record usually filed under new age belongs somewhere else entirely. Toby Manning's case is that it is as much a forerunner of post-rock as the more celebrated work of Talk Talk.

The parallel is the spine of the piece. Talk Talk and Japan both came out of punk, both switched to synth pop, both found commercial success and then changed direction. Sylvian's 1984 debut Brilliant Trees and Talk Talk's 1986 The Colour of Spring were both more organic and artier than what preceded them while still reaching the UK top 10, and both had abstract passages that pointed forward. Mark Hollis is routinely named as a post-rock ancestor. Sylvian is not.

Gone to Earth's format is itself a kind of refusal: seven long songs, then a second album of ambient instrumentals. The song side carries Robert Fripp of King Crimson and Bill Nelson of Be Bop Deluxe on guitars, with Sylvian's brother Steve Jansen on drums, Richard Barbieri on electronics, Jennifer Maidman of Penguin Cafe on bass, Mel Collins on soprano sax and Kenny Wheeler on flugelhorn.

The writing takes its cues from outside music as often as inside it. Taking The Veil lifts its chorus lyric from Max Ernst's 1930 collage novel A Little Girl Dreams Of Taking the Veil. Before The Bullfight draws on Miles Davis's Sketches Of Spain, and Gil Evans's arrangement of Solea in particular. Laughter And Forgetting invokes Milan Kundera. Silver Moon keeps pop's verse and chorus structure and then drifts away from it.

The instrumental disc is starker than the songs and complements them rather than padding them out. Sylvian himself described those tracks as static, in contrast to Brian Eno's more kinetic ambient work, and titles like Sunlight Seen Through Towering Trees and A Bird Of Prey Vanishes Into A Bright Blue Cloudless Sky make the pastoral intent explicit. Manning hears Tortoise coming a decade early in them.

The reason it went unclaimed is partly production. Manning concedes that listeners have had to learn to hear mid-80s records like this one, Peter Gabriel's So and Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love through the booming drums and electronic washes of the period. Gone to Earth is the least synthesised and least pop of that group, which made it easier to dismiss at the time and is exactly why the rock reappraisal is arriving now.