David Byrne: American Utopia

DAVID BYRNE: AMERICAN UTOPIA (2018)

1) I Dance Like This; 2) Gasoline And Dirty Sheets; 3) Every Day Is A Miracle; 4) Dogʼs Mind; 5) This Is That; 6) Itʼs Not Dark Up Here; 7) Bullet; 8) Doing The Right Thing; 9) Everybodyʼs Coming To My House; 10) Here.

General verdict: A record that is supposed to make you feel happy, but instead makes you feel confused... and this would have been a compliment in 1979, but not in 2018.

David Byrne has been so active and so much around in the first two decades of the 21st century that it is actually surprising to realize that American Utopia is his first proper solo album of new material in fourteen years — everything since Grown Backwards has been either soundtracks, or collaborations, or guest appearances. Even on this album, most of the songs are co-credited to David and Brian Eno (two to David and electronic artist Daniel Lopatin), but at least the album as a whole is not attributed to the two of them, which is understandable, since American Utopia is very much Byrne in spirit and relatively little Eno.

One of the reasons is that, as the years go by, David seems less and less interested in making «pure» music and is more and more slipping into the Wagnerian spirit of Gesamtkunstwerk, something that had already become fully manifested in the era of Stop Making Sense and True Stories and has now become the norm for the man — American Utopia was announced as part of a much larger multi-media project called Reasons To Be Cheerful (title borrowed from Ian Dury) and was very quickly transformed into a Broadway musical that had itself a nice little run from late 2019 to early 2020, shutting down right in time for the COVID-19 disaster. Speaking of which, the album should play right up 2020ʼs general alley — allegedly it is all about staying cheerful and optimistic in the face of terrible odds, something that was fairly characteristic of Byrneʼs art from day one but is now directly pronounced rather than just hinted at.

Although from a purely musical standpoint, the album is highly eclectic and its tunes are difficult to assign to any particular genre, it is clear that musical structures and arrangement details here are secondary to the artistic message — itʼs just the way David has always worked and you will neither catch him pandering to any particular trend nor dumbing down the music to amplify its mass appeal. For instance, ʽGasoline And Dirty Sheetsʼ will combine Indian sitars, country-western harmonicas, old-fashioned New Wave guitars and new-fashioned drum programming to the point where all this synthesis leaves you confused and disoriented; but whether all this kaleidoscopic mush actually has a point, and whether the music in this song really «matters» next to its lyrics, is quite debatable.

Maybe it was the collaboration with St. Vincent that rubbed off so seriously on David, but the problem remains the same as it was with Love This Giant — I respect the work that went into the making of this album, but I do not properly feel it. At the core, these are fairly accessible pop songs, often with catchy choruses and shit, but if their point is indeed to transmit a feeling of hope and optimism in the midst of troubled times, I must confess that I sense neither too much trouble nor too much happiness in the music. Good case in point: ʽEvery Day Is A Miracleʼ, where the somewhat somber verses are supposed to contrast with the somewhat cheerful chorus. Lyrically, the song is astute and occasionally hilarious, right from the point where David reflects on what Heaven should look like for a chicken ("...and God is a very old rooster / And eggs are like Jesus, his son"). But musically, the verse is reduced to a few rumbly bars of synth-bass and the chorus is just a limp ska pattern whose melody might just as well be played by a bunch of automatons. It is loud enough and you might be tempted to sing along to "every day is a miracle, every day is an unpaid bill", yet nothing in the song either creates real tension or relieves it. Itʼs just a song, no better or worse than a million other ones.

I think that the only number on American Utopia where I smelled the faintest glint of tension was ʽItʼs Not Dark Up Hereʼ, with its jumpy change of tone from verse to chorus and mildly spooky "HEY!" that changes the discourse from protagonist to his imaginary-hallucinatory conversation partner in the skies above. It does not hurt, either, that the song is driven by paranoidally funky guitars, not unlike in the good old days — yet even so, thereʼs light years of distance between the spookiness of this chorus and something like, say, ʽMemories Canʼt Waitʼ or ʽSlippery Peopleʼ.

In the end, while I cannot for the life of me properly badmouth any of these songs for any specific sins, I still cannot help but view American Utopia as an artistic failure. It is clearly a conceptual project that must have meant a lot to David at this point, but even a weakass Talking Heads album like True Stories ended up making more sense and providing more emotional release than this collection of well-crafted, but ultimately cold and limp songs. Certainly the words deserve to be studied, and I am glad to see Byrne, at the age of 66, in such fine vocal form and with so many different ideas, even when they are derivative or ineffective. And perhaps in the context of his Broadway show, interspersed with genuine Heads classics, they do make better sense. But for now they do nothing to dissuade me from the opinion that Byrneʼs spark of genius went extinct somewhere around the time of Look Into The Eyeball, and that not even a global pandemic or a worldwide economic crisis will be enough to rekindle it at this time. 

David Byrne & St. Vincent: Love This Giant

DAVID BYRNE & ST. VINCENT: LOVE THIS GIANT (2012)

1) Who; 2) Weekend In The Dust; 3) Dinner For Two; 4) Ice Age; 5) I Am An Ape; 6) The Forest Awakes; 7) I Should Watch TV; 8) Lazarus; 9) Optimist; 10) Lightning; 11) The One Who Broke Your Heart; 12) Outside Of Space & Time.

General verdict: A curiously clumsy pop artefact whose pretense does not at all seem to match the emotional power and meaning of its melodies. In other words, "I respect this, but it sucks".

Since I have no immediate plans to cover the colorful career of Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, and since this album is genuinely a balanced collaboration between her and David Byrne, we might just as well file this under Byrneʼs discography for the moment. As we know, David is a big fan of joint projects, and some of his past collaborative activities clearly show why — My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, for one thing, is a classic that did require the joint talents of Byrne and Eno to deserve that status. But as the new millennium came into being, and with it, the added yearning to stay «relevant» in the world of artistic evolution, it is only natural that he would begin seeking out younger collaborators from the next generation.

On paper, St. Vincent might look like the perfect choice — she is young enough to be Davidʼs daughter, she is an unconventional pop artist with a predilection for all things weird and eccentric, and she has been compared to just about everybody in the art-pop world, from Bowie to Kate Bush and beyond. Taking the vintage boomer madness of David Byrne and synthesizing it with the fresh millennial creativity of St. Vincent seems like an instant-win formula, and such is the impression that you get from reading quite a few glowing reviews in the mainstream press — yet on the whole, the reaction was mixed, and the album never got truly enshrined as a classic for either Byrne or Annie Clark... and I think I can see why.

Love This Giant is definitely very «creative». The basic idea, suggested by St. Vincent, was to write a set of pop songs around brass-based arrangements, because... because why not. This does give an aura of relative sameness to the proceedings, but since the brass melodies themselves follow all sorts of different patterns, from classic R&B to Latin to marching bands to Radiohead-style freakouts (think ʽThe National Anthemʼ), this is not a big problem. The songs themselves are complex, twisted artefacts, with intricate and unpredictable combinations of brass, drums (largely programmed), synth bass, convoluted vocal overdubs from the two main singers, and surprisingly little guitar, in spite of Annieʼs well-advertised mastery of the instrument. It is hard to define their relative genres and even harder to ascribe specific meanings to their vividly impressionistic lyrics. But isnʼt that a sign of elusive genius?..

Actually, not quite. As the songs slowly sink in, listen after listen, I begin to understand that this is the kind of record that I, at best, will remember with polite respect, but not with the kind of emotional admiration that my conscience reserves for true genius. Like most other acclaimed art-pop wizards of the 2000s, such as Sufjan Stevens (whose touring band Annie was actually in before embarking on a proper solo career) and Joanna Newsom, St. Vincent is one of those Artists who spend way too much time wiring up the neon lights to the big A — instead of, at least sometimes, just cutting loose and telling things the way they are. Whenever she takes the wheel on this album, I definitely get that she is trying to do something, but I almost never get what it is exactly that she is trying to do; and when I do seem to get it, it turns out that I have to think about it rather than feel about it, which is simply not the way that genius art works. It does not help, either, that she has a fairly common singing voice and that, whenever she does get to play the guitar, she is quite mediocre at it (I know that Annieʼs guitar playing is sometimes toted as iconic for female players, but I am not sure how anybody seriously familiar with the story of guitar playing from Hendrix to Belew to Prince to, say, Marc Ribot could characterize her work as anything but amateurish in nature).

Still, passable singing and guitar playing do not matter much if the songwriting and general artistry are top level, and these songs are not top level. All are credited jointly to David and Annie, and there is a visible effort to somewhat synthesize the styles of the two, but, at the very least, they are still separated by who takes lead vocal on what, and it also seems as if St. Vincent is really, really, really trying to out-weird David at his own game, so the Byrne-led songs actually sound a bit more conventional, both melody-wise and lyrics-wise, than Annieʼs. What is worse, with all due respect to those who are sick and tired of the word «chemistry», there is about as much of it in between the two artists as the album cover, on which they look like two long-lost separated members of the Addams Family, suggests.

The record does set out with a bit of a promise: ʽWhoʼ is a good example of a Byrne dirge, with a touching vocal melody that goes from confused verse to plaintive chorus — except that Annieʼs melismatic bridge of "who is an honest man?" does not fit in well, sounding more like a random interpolation from some other song (say, about a cheating lover or something) than part of an ongoing dialog between the two protagonists. Actually, there is very little dialog between Byrne and St. Vincent anywhere on the album: every once in a while, they sing a few lines in unison, usually with one singer clearly overshadowing the other, and thatʼs it. The record feels more like a Meistersingersʼ competition than a truly joint project.

On the St. Vincent side, a typical song will be something like ʽIce Ageʼ, with its metronomic mid-tempo rhythm, quietly and inobtrusively bubbling brass riffage, and unconventionally accentuated words ("oh dia-MOND... all unbutTONED..."). Stare at the lyrics long enough and you will get the idea that the song is about an emotionally obstructed partner, but the idea is not at all supported by the music, which, at best, sounds like inoffensive jazz-pop on tranquilizers. Did I say there is no chemistry between St. Vincent and Byrne? Well, much of the time there is even no chemistry between St. Vincent and the music that backs her up: the potentially gorgeous Cocteau Twins-ish falsetto refrain of "we wonʼt know how much we lost until the winter thaws" loses its impact in the company of that ugly synth bass line and those meandering, decidedly un-romantic brass patterns. Unconventional experimental patterns like these are scattered all through the album, but rarely, if ever, end up making much emotional sense.

On the Byrne side, a typical song will be something like ʽI Should Watch TVʼ, another of Davidʼs ironic portrayals of the confused urban dweller; but it has been a long time since David last managed to convincingly act out a paranoid existence, and neither the vocal melody nor the usual atmospheric brass arrangement help the song to become memorable. Sometimes he falls back on classic vocal tricks — ʽDinner For Twoʼ distantly echoes ʽDonʼt Worry About The Governmentʼ, for instance — but doing so does not bring back the energy of classic Talking Heads, not when the music is dominated by this math-rockish approach to brass playing.

Overall, I would not want to make any hasty generalizations, and Iʼd even be totally open to taking some of the nasty things said above back if they ever gave me a second chance — all I can say for sure is that Love This Giant was built upon one daring, experimental idea («let us make an album that has saxophones and trombones as the main instruments and does not sound like Blood, Sweat & Tears!»), and that the idea did not work. It is perfectly possible to teach yourself to love this giant, uh, I mean, album — just latch on to its complexity, its multiple layers, its symbolism, its clear desire to produce something fresh and intelligent — but, honestly, I just do not have that much love in me to forcefully waste it on this kind of record.

David Byrne: Grown Backwards

DAVID BYRNE: GROWN BACKWARDS (2004)

1) Glass, Concrete & Stone; 2) The Man Who Loved Beer; 3) Au Fond Du Temple Saint; 4) Empire; 5) Tiny Apocalypse; 6) She Only Sleeps; 7) Dialog Box; 8) The Other Side Of This Life; 9) Why; 10) Pirates; 11) Civilization; 12) Astronaut; 13) Glad; 14) Un Di Felice, Eterea.

General verdict: Tasteful, soothing, intelligent, ironic, catchy, and just a wee bit cleansed of excitement that one is expected to crave when dealing with the art of a Talking Head. Even a former Talking Head.

As Davidʼs preoccupation with the worlds of neoclassical music, Broadway and off-Broadway shows, and electronic artists gradually overcame his passion for straightahead rock and pop, something like Grown Backwards was bound to happen sooner or later — a record where the funky groove, hitherto the backbone of all things related to Talking Heads and Byrneʼs own solo career, is unceremoniously dumped and trodden over in favor of a little jazz, a little bossa nova, a lot of chamber music, and even a healthy selection of... opera.

Yes, this is where you will find David trying his trachea at not one, but two famous opera arias: ʽAu Fond Du Temple Saintʼ from Bizetʼs Les Pêcheurs De Perles (with Rufus Wainwright as second vocalist) and ʽUn Di Feliceʼ from La Traviata. I cannot even say that he does a poor job with them, unless we automatically consider every non-opera-trained singerʼs delivery of an opera aria a poor job by definition. But the only serious reason that I can see for doing this is that David must have been on a solid opera kick at the time, and thought that by putting these pieces on his next album he might introduce a bunch of veteran fans to the wonders of 19th century opera. Also, both arias (technically, duets, but David only picks the male parts, for which we thank him) deal with the mystical nature of amorous trance, so perhaps this is really all just a sly throwback to those early days when a very young David Byrne sang about "Believe, believe in mystery / Love is simple as one, two, three", and now, as he is growing backwards, he wants us to be reminded that certain lyrical heroes of days long gone by used to sing about the exact same things in significantly different manners, but with the exact same message.

Do relax though, because this new hobby does not take up all of Davidʼs time, and most of the other tracks are quite honestly and diligently self-written, with the exception of ʽThe Man Who Loved Beerʼ, a nice old chamber-country ditty from Lambchop, set to the reworked lyrics of a classic Old Egyptian poem that is 100% right up Davidʼs alley — "to whom can I speak today? the gentleness has perished and the violent man has come down on everyone". It is a lovely vocal melody, curled around a lovely strings-and-synths arrangement, but I must say that I do know the original and this reworking is not that much of an improvement or even of a reinvention — on the other hand, I rarely have a problem with David singing about the atrocities of life in lovable vocal overtones across lovable musical backgrounds.

The problem is that he does it a lot on this album, and there is too little roughness in between all the crooning to prevent it from gluing together. ʽEmpireʼ is sweet and smoothly majestic, setting grim lyrical irony ("whatʼs good for business is good for us all") against horn-driven music that vaguely recalls old-school art-pop; ʽThe Other Side Of This Lifeʼ is a Randy Newman-esque pop waltz, specially tailored to raise empathy for the lyrical hero; ʽPiratesʼ is... gentle zydeco meets corny vaudeville? whatever; ʽAstronautʼ, with its slide guitars and honey-sweet lullaby vocals is as peaceful and soporific as an early Eightiesʼ George Harrison ballad — I mean, all of these songs are good, without exception, but it is not very interesting to write or talk about them, because they tell us nothing new about Byrneʼs artistry, and, perhaps more importantly, they never cut too deep, what with David becoming more and more of a courteous gentleman with age instead of that young and lovable quasi-autistic son of a bitch who could twist knives within societyʼs ulcers rather than just gently ironize over them.

In the end, I believe that my favorite piece on here is the bonus track — a grotesquely huge orchestrated re-recording of the song ʽLazyʼ, originally issued by the British house project X-Press 2 with Byrne on vocals. The original was largely notable for its funny video of a lazy guy on the sofa which seemed to be taken right out of the True Stories format; this reworking is one that I find much more musically interesting, with a mixed techno-disco arrangement and a mish-mash of strings and electronics that actually brings back the required groove while at the same time being psychedelic and generally fun. Had this kind of style actually been realized more often on the album itself, Iʼd be a bigger fan; instead, the few times when the music is danceable just take us back to Davidʼs well-explored love of Latin rhythms. 

David Byrne: Look Into The Eyeball

DAVID BYRNE: LOOK INTO THE EYEBALL (2001)

1) U. B. Jesus; 2) The Revolution; 3) The Great Intoxication; 4) Like Humans Do; 5) Broken Things; 6) The Accident; 7) Desconocido Soy; 8) Neighborhood; 9) Smile; 10) The Moment Of Conception; 11) Walk On Water; 12) Everyoneʼs In Love With You.

General verdict: A musical interpretation of Davidʼs pension plan, but I certainly do not mean this in a condescending manner. (Plus, his pension plan probably got a nice fat boost from Microsoft!).

Two things really stick out in David Byrneʼs first album of new material in the 21st century: his defiantly new coat of silver-white hair, which would eventually make him look like the other Davidʼs (Lynchʼs) twin brother — and, of course, ʽLike Humans Doʼ, the song fondly or hatedly remembered by most users of Windows XP who ever tinkered around with its media player (Iʼve always been a Winamp person through and through, so I do not have as many haunting memories of the song as other people claim to have). It is not even clear what the message of ʽLike Humans Doʼ, a song written from the viewpoint of a foetus, has to do with Windows Media Player, unless it is meant to be some weirdly veiled plea to adopt a piece of software. But it did bring David Byrne into a lot of homes, including many people whoʼd never even heard of Talking Heads, and at least it was a decidedly less annoying partnership than Apple + U2.

That said, this record isnʼt nearly as fun as Feelings. On the whole, it is smoother and sweeter, giving us a far more pacified and good-vibe-oriented Byrne than last time around — an almost 100% turnaround from the gloomy desperation of the self-titled album, implying that David seems to have finally overcome his midlife crisis. There is an enormous list of session musicians, most of them classically trained, turning the album into a sea of chamber and symphonic pop crossed with the usual African-American and Latin rhythms that are all over the place, from Seventies-style soul-pop (ʽNeighborhoodʼ) to experimental neo-disco (ʽDesconocido Soyʼ). But there is no such immediate feel of diversity as last time around, largely because of the focused attention on strings arrangements and a largely unified mood all across the record.

Most of the songs are still well-written and quickly get through; it is just that their charm is all in melodic and lyrical subtleties, and does not tend to linger long after you have actually soaked in the song. The opening number, ʽU. B. Jesusʼ, starts out with a mysterious percussion rhythm that sounds like it came straight out of Tom Waitsʼ Rain Dogs-era textbook, and even the lyrics, seemingly making fun of the too overtly religious approach to life, are reminiscent of Tom — but the melodic melange of Latin rhythms, poppy strings, and gospel backing vocals is a classic bit of Byrne synthesis. Its only problem is that, like most of the stuff here, it feels a bit whimsical and even repetitive after a while. But the string riff is cool.

ʽLike Humans Doʼ is actually fairly indicative of the record at large — a pleasant, toe-tappingly catchy pop song with a lengthy and well-structured chorus, and an entertaining melody exchange between David and the accompanying strings and woodwinds. It is rather fluffy, though, even if it is an intelligent and endearing kind of fluff; I simply happen to feel so much more connection with David Byrneʼs lyrical hero when he is befuddled and terrified by stuff happening around him than when he gets all cutesy and cuddly, with a big childish grin all across his face (or all across whatever a developing foetus is supposed to have, in this particular case). Even so, there were times in the past when he was able to get all cuddly and cathartic at the same time — just roll back to ʽThis Must Be The Placeʼ for a brief while. ʽLike Humans Doʼ, in comparison, has no emotional peaks — its chorus is smoothly talkative and ends on a delicate question mark rather than a brusque exclamation point.

This is, however, merely an attempt to explain why this music no longer lifts me up: it still does a great job at holding me down while itʼs on, and I will be the first to admit the sorrowful beauty of the question "whoʼs still workinʼ on his masterpiece?" (ʽThe Great Intoxicationʼ), or of Davidʼs sentimental croon on ʽNeighborhoodʼ, whose music is all Seventiesʼ soul-pop but whose vocal and lyrical vibe is all Ray Davies, intimate and supportive optimism in the face of grim odds. On rare occasions, Byrne still allows himself to slip into a slightly more grayish mood, and it does not feel at odds with the rest of the album — ʽBroken Thingsʼ, the hardest rocking song on the album, is a piece of slow, grinding funk whose dark bass and aggressive power chords remind you that not all is well in the house of the aging Byrne City Dweller, but he is working on it.

I think the only piece here that we could all do without is ʽDesconocido Soyʼ, whose clumsy combo of disco-techno, Spanish lyrics, and psychedelic background vocals might technically be the most innovative cocktail on the album — but the effect is annoying, particularly since this puffed-up ball of dance energy feels stiff and unnatural against the smooth background of the other songs. Perhaps it is the kind of track that should rather be donated to some proper Latin artist, provided he or she agreed to take it in the first place.

The most satisfying thing about the record, though, is that David Byrne is still David Byrne — even when he is going all sunshine and rainbows on your ass, you know this is the one guy who will never succumb to cheap, one-dimensional sentimentalism. As the album closes with its most honey-dripping tune, BingCrosbishly-titled ʽEveryoneʼs In Love With Youʼ, a closer look at the lyrics shows that it is actually about ferocious jealousy ("I want to kill and kiss you too"), but good luck figuring that out from the basic emotional response to this sweet goodnight lullaby. These little things help explain why I am intermittently intrigued by this record, charmed by it, and then bored right out of my skull — not necessarily in that order. In any case, it is quite recommendable, but, like many others, it shows a formerly great artist comfortably settling in the overall nonchalance and foggy laziness of the new millennium — which, I guess, is at least much more honest than trying to defy Fate and be pretentious in the face of impossibility. 

David Byrne: Feelings

DAVID BYRNE: FEELINGS (1997)

1) Fuzzy Freaky; 2) Miss America; 3) A Soft Seduction; 4) Dance On Vaseline; 5) The Gates Of Paradise; 6) Amnesia; 7) You Donʼt Know Me; 8) Daddy Go Down; 9) Finite = Alright; 10) Wicked Little Doll; 11) Burnt By The Sun; 12) The Civil Wars; 13) (Interlude); 14) They Are In Love.

General verdict: A solid return to form, even if the songs may require repeated listens to reveal themselves to you in all their complexity.

So either it is just that David was going through a really rough phase around 1994, or, perhaps, it was the No Talking Just Head debacle that shook him up and made him realize how far he had strayed from his musical identity — whatever the reason, Feelings is a damn good album that manages to correct most of the mistakes heʼd made on the self-titled David Byrne. There are no breakthroughs here, no serious attempts to invent some new synthesis, even despite the elements of collaboration with Morcheeba; but there are songs that bring back funky grooves, humor, and cool musical hooks, all the while retaining Byrneʼs usual depth and intelligence.

It all begins with ʽFuzzy Freakyʼ, easily Davidʼs catchiest and slinkiest tune in at least a decade: the combination of funky wah-wah guitar, menacing intonations in the verse melody and falsetto suspense in the chorus creates a weirdly sleazy atmosphere that could be decoded in a million different ways, given the lyrical vagueness — but each of these ways would be either offensive or provocative, considering that the chorus goes "itʼs summertime and the weeds are high, fuzzy freaky, funny family". The text is a mess, the melody is one big fuzzy wobble, the guitar solo, whoever is doing it, rips through the speakers in sharp, treble-soaked wailing waves... basically, itʼs alive, which is more than could be said about anything on the first record.

 

From there, the album takes us on a little journey through different territories. Byrneʼs love for Latin American rhythms comes back into play (ʽMiss Americaʼ, ʽThey Are In Loveʼ), while Morcheeba helps him develop a new love for trip-hop (ʽDance On Vaselineʼ). There are quiet sentimental ballads (ʽA Soft Seductionʼ), string-led chamber pieces (ʽFinite = Alrightʼ), loud psychedelic pop anthems (ʽThe Gates Of Paradiseʼ), at least one song that sounds like a tribute to the Velvet Undergroundʼs ʽVenus In Fursʼ (ʽDaddy Go Downʼ), and at least one song that shows David may have developed a special love for old friend Adrian Belewʼs brand of intellectual-idealistic pop (ʽBurnt By The Sunʼ). All of these tunes have something to offer by way of both melody and lyrics, even if they never rise to the heights of Talking Headsʼ best material.

ʽMiss Americaʼ is probably the one song that gets the most mentions on the album because of its near-manifesto status: "I love America, her secretʼs safe with me" — David discussing, with a surprisingly high level of candor, his complicated love-and-hate relationship with the country that sheltered him from childhood (and donʼt we all, really?). Musically, however, it is not the most interesting track, essentially sounding like a potential outtake from Rei Momo or Uh-Huh sessions: its samba rhythms make a nicely joyous counterpoint to the half-sincere, half-sarcastic lyrics, but for musical inspiration, Iʼd rather go to something like ʽDance On Vaselineʼ, which combines a small pinch of Remain In Light jerkiness with echoey brass creating the kind of dusky atmosphere you find on Miles Davisʼ Bitches Brew — and is also far more enigmatic from a lyrical standpoint (come to think of it, "come preacherman, shoot me with your poisoned arrow, but I dance on Vaseline" is one of the most weirdly articulated statements of freedom and immunity to come from a human mind).

On the other hand, Byrneʼs Feelings are clearly meant to be expressed here in such a way that words and melody are just about 50-50 important. A song like ʽThe Gates Of Paradiseʼ, for instance, without its verbal content balances between soft, cuddly verses, caressing your ear with Davidʼs sweetest crooning and a warmly ambient organ pattern, and all-out ecstatic choruses of exuberant joy, climaxing in a frenetic psychedelic guitar solo at the end. At the same time, the words are pure, undiluted cynicism: "Itʼs a sin to seek perfection / Itʼs a sin to help the poor / Itʼs a sin to hold convictions / For none of them are true" — only a very seriously pissed-off person could have come up with something as brash as that. Amazingly, the song, especially its ecstatic coda, has somehow triggered in my mind an association with Fleetwood Macʼs ʽEyes Of The Worldʼ — another musically similar «ode to joy» whose actual lyrics are a rant against deceit and hypocrisy. Great minds deviate alike?..

The more you listen to the record, the more you begin to understand that, perhaps, the gloomy and depressed frame of mind that was so much on display in the self-titled album had never really gone anywhere — it is just that David took better control of himself and returned to that complex state of ambiguity, where the complexity, diversity, and occasionally optimistic mood-setting of the music made all the gloom and depression sound less self-important, more ironic, and, ulti­mately, far more poignant and influential. You know that he is pissed off if the verse melody of ʽBurnt By The Sunʼ hits you on precisely the same beats as Bob Dylanʼs ʽHurricaneʼ — but he is not above outbalancing the anger with sweet Belew-ish nostalgia when it gets to the chorus ("we were burnt by the sun, having way too much fun..."). In short, we have quite a few of those onion layers on each of these songs, and thatʼs the way it should be. Damn good record. 

David Byrne: David Byrne

DAVID BYRNE: DAVID BYRNE (1994)

1) A Long Time Ago; 2) Angels; 3) Crash; 4) A Self-Made Man; 5) Back In The Box; 6) Sad Song; 7) Nothing At All; 8) My Love Is You; 9) Lilies Of The Valley; 10) You & Eye; 11) Strange Ritual; 12) Buck Naked.

General verdict: Meet the new David "Schopenhauer" Byrne, now putting his musical legacy in the service of pessimistic sociology and whatnot.

A self-titled album in the middle of an artistʼs career frequently implies a self-reboot, some sort of impulsive awakening which may or may not work, but at least shows that the artist is trying. In the case of David Byrne, however, it almost looks like this lack of a title was merely meant to agree that the artist no longer has anything particularly interesting to say, period.

This is not a bad record, mind you. It may sound very boring first time around, then it may slowly begin to grow as you realize that it is very deeply personal, and that being subjected to a deeply personal experience experienced by somebody with the talent, intellect, and life story of a David Byrne is, at the very least... useful, if not necessarily enjoyable. But this is what it is: much more of a personal confession in a state of mid-life crisis than a musical piece. Once you come to terms with the fact that almost nothing worthy of serious attention goes on here, musically, it may be easier to accept everything else that is of value. Yet I cannot help feeling a little weird, and sad, when it turns out that even the frickinʼ Tom Tom Club has finally made a jump on David Byrne in terms of musical experimentation and innovation.

I do not really know what was going on in Davidʼs life at the age of 42, but I have recently been through that age myself, and that state of mind is relatable. He is not exploring any issues here that he hadnʼt had at least a small brush with previously, but he is now picking at them with melancholic ferociousness: "I kept my feelings to myself / Until the perfect moment comes", he states on the very first track. I am not sure why that "perfect moment" had to be 1994, a year that, to the best of my memory, was hardly one of those surrender-all-hope years — and this, in fact, might be one of the main reasons why David Byrne disappointed just about everybody and is still rated fairly low on the Byrne-o-meter by critics and fans alike. Ironically, the record just might feel closer to home in 2020; or maybe it is simply my own growing old, because, had I actually heard it fresh from the oven, Iʼd probably dismiss it just as well.

But oh yeah, music comes first. And musically, this is not just a complete departure from the odd Latin-funk-pop synthesis that Byrne curated all through the Eighties; this is actually a mish-mash of styles — Talking Heads styles, solo Byrne styles, other artistsʼ styles — where it is obvious that David tries not to bore you with a monotonous approach, but is also obvious that he is just rewriting old patterns. Many of the songs have evident progenitors. ʽAngelsʼ, for instance, uses a bass pattern very similar to ʽOnce In A Lifetimeʼ. The playful rhythmics and screechy guitar of ʽBack In The Boxʼ take cues from the upbeat material on Little Creatures (hilariously, though, I just realized that the main melody may very well have been subconsciously influenced by Genesisʼ ʽI Canʼt Danceʼ!). The long atmospheric start to ʽStrange Ritualʼ, with its delayed guitars running ghostly circles around your ears, is something directly out of Brian Enoʼs textbook — think one of those instrumentals on Another Green World. And so on.

No wonder, then, that if you approach the album from a position of musical experience, the songs will not look like much of anything. Worse, even a dude with razor-sharp wit and God-given inspiration might eventually cease to be interesting if he just keeps making the same artistic points over and over again — and I cannot promise that this album will let you know anything about Byrne, the thinking personʼs artist, that you, the thinking person (you are a thinking person, right?), have not already known or at least suspected before. But if you want yourself just a few nifty nuances, and if you want to hear a David Byrne who is a little unusually more quiet and contemplative than ever before, the record is worth your while.

The album lives under the shadow of ʽA Long Time Agoʼ, a sort of jazzy meditation with astral overtones — lots of tricky guitar lines overloaded with echo effects, against the background of which the voice of David slowly drifts in space. Curiously, it shares stylistic similarities with Bends- and OK Computer-era Radiohead, though the instrumental arrangements are nowhere near as attention-attracting; the overall message is much the same, though — a sad farewell to the old world and a bit of discomfort and trepidation at the coming of a new one. Listen hard enough and it is difficult not to feel pity at the songʼs conclusion — "itʼs only the singing of the stars, they burned out a long, long time ago...". This is genuinely the saddest and gloomiest that Byrne ever got, which is not really a compliment — so far, the guy has always worked best when he was hiding his depression under a spastic coat of irony and eccentricity, and while taking off oneʼs mask is always an act of bravery, the end result always has a 50/50 chance of amazing people or severely disappointing them. In this case, the typical reaction might be relative indifference: we know, really, that melancholic nostalgia and fear of the future have been two of Byrneʼs primary building blocks for the previous ten years, so this «coming out» with an explicit confession is, if not totally predictable, at least somewhat to be expected.

Later on, we learn that "there are no angels left in America anymore", which does not exactly set your mind reeling as strongly as it did when the same song was ʽOnce In A Lifetimeʼ. We get a ʽHeavenʼ-type acoustic ballad where we learn that "weʼre living in a dump, trying to figure out what sex we are" (no, this is not about transgender issues). We get that odd ʽI Canʼt Danceʼ clone in which we learn that "the sun shines on the evil, the sun shines on the good, it doesnʼt favour righteousness, although you wish it would" and that the protagonist is "going back in the box again", though, honestly, heʼd never left it in the first place. We have ʽNothing At Allʼ, a song that begins with the same gloomy bass swoop as Aimee Mannʼs ʽSave Meʼ would a few years later — totally not a coincidence, because both artistsʼ aesthetics are dangerously close at this time. We do get a thin thread of romance and sentimentalism, too, like in the short acoustic ballad ʽMy Love Is Youʼ which sounds exactly like a Ray Davies trying his hand at bossa nova — but we do get the message that this cuddly sentimentalism is just one way of alleviating the heroʼs pains and shutting him off from the outside world.

What we also get, unfortunately, is a sort of half-assed attitude when it comes to developing and realizing all these ideas. In a recent appreciation of the late David Bermanʼs Purple Mountains, I was struck by how it was possible to express such a decided and resolute state of self-ejection from the world through such friendly and worldly musical means, making you deeply respectful and genuinely terrified of the artist at once. This album, on the contrary, is not resolute at all — it meanders, it hobbles around from one shred of musical depression to another, and even though, fortunately enough, it is not at all self-pitying, it... well, letʼs just say it sprays its message all around you in faint whiffs of aerosol, rather than sending it flying like a bullet in your skull. Itʼs not that Byrneʼs musical muscles have become flabby; it is rather that he has consciously allowed them to atrophy without thinking of a way to make the best use of it. Of course, with anybody less talented than Byrne this entire «more existentialist philosophy, less musical invention» strategy would be aural and intellectual torture. With Byrne, it is more like «hmm, nice change of direction, David, but did you really have to let your hair grow that long to do it?»

David Byrne: Uh-Oh

DAVID BYRNE: UH-OH (1992)

1) Now Iʼm Your Mom; 2) Girls On My Mind; 3) Something Ainʼt Right; 4) Sheʼs Mad; 5) Hanging Upside Down; 6) A Walk In The Dark; 7) Twistinʼ In The Wind; 8) The Cowboy Mambo (Hey Lookit Me Now); 9) Monkey Man; 10) A Million Miles Away; 11) Tiny Town; 12) Somebody.

General verdict: Back to a normal routine of churning out smart pop statements — but without any big surprises, unless an emphasis on vague sociopolitical commentary actually counts.

This is a very nice sounding record, but if there ever was one moment where you could very clearly state that David Byrne had ceased to be an advanced creative force in the world of pop music, then the appropriately titled Uh-Oh, coming just three months after the official dissolution of Talking Heads, is the best candidate for such a moment. There is no doubt that David wanted to make this record, that it still captures him in a state of enjoying and nurturing his personal muse, but it looks like the days of having wild sex on the kitchen table are over, and we are now at the stage of courtly, leisurely, and regulated lovemaking in the bedroom.

A lot of this still sounds like Rei Momo, except that now David does not press the issue: Latin American associations are absent from the title, from the cover, and from most of the individual song titles and lyrics (with the exception of ʽCowboy Mamboʼ which isnʼt even a mambo). The musicianship is very mixed, with a large crowd of Brazilian, American, and European players involved in the sessions; and the overall spirit is still quite carnivalesque with an occasional darker streak, but the song structures veer more closely to the traditional pop in the same way it was on Little Creatures — no amount of lively brass overdubs can mask that.

Actually, at least some of the songs, in some subtle ways, are more creative and thought-provoking than the ones on Rei Momo. Thus, ʽNow Iʼm Your Momʼ, opening the record, is a song about sex change, in which Byrne not only manages to present the entire spectrum of views on that issue (from critical to embracing), but also makes the melody go through corresponding mood shifts, from harsh menacing funk in the verses to happy nonchalant pop in the chorus, not to mention a musically brilliant instrumental passage in which several polyphonic horn overdubs seemingly try to musicalize the «birds and bees» metaphor. The only thing that prevents the song from becoming a true classic is the exact same thing that is now common for Byrneʼs material: an invisible feel of «fluffiness», a sense that Byrneʼs sweet falsetto on the "birds and the bees" chorus is not exactly the man at his deepest. But if we can somehow bypass that problem for Paul McCartney, I guess it can eventually be bypassed for Byrne as well.

Or perhaps not, because when it comes to songs with less complex time signatures and fewer shifts in tonalities and more straightforward lyrics, it is hard to rate them anything higher than «passable fun» — ʽGirls On My Mindʼ is just such an example. Davidʼs excited and perturbed singing tone on that one makes it look as if he is trying to recapture the inspiration from the early days of Talking Heads (and, for that matter, it is hardly a coincidence that Uh-Oh apes the start of the title of the first track of Talking Headsʼ debut album), but where songs like ʽUh-Oh, Love Comes To Townʼ were introducing a brand new sound and a brand new artistic way of looking at the world, ʽGirls On My Mindʼ is now just an inferior variation on a very old strategy, and could be construed as a misguided attempt at self-aggrandizing from an old perv, rather than the mental confusion of a young city dweller, incapable of understanding or controlling his urges. Not that it ainʼt still fun — even an old perv deserves compassion — but, you know, anybody who has girls on his mind is probably capable of writing a toothless song like this one. (For comparison, it takes some real teeth to write something like, say, Oingo Boingoʼs ʽLittle Girlsʼ!).

That said, it is hard to find serious individual flaws with most of the songs as long as they are playing. The playful madhouse of ʽSomething Ainʼt Rightʼ with its crazy cicada whistles. The subversion of the Bo Diddley beat on ʽSheʼs Madʼ, and the songʼs eventual transformation from a paranoid rocker into a sentimental Latin dance. The creepy vaudeville of ʽA Walk In The Darkʼ, which sounds like a song Byrne might have written for Alice Cooper before deciding he could have his own way with it just as well. The possible dylanism of "I ainʼt gonna work here no more" at the start of ʽA Million Miles Awayʼ. The odd muezzin modulations in the middle of the otherwise still-latinized ʽTiny Townʼ — aw shucks, really quite a few of these tasty moments that make it all seem worth the while.

It is just weird how quickly they tend to slip away from memory once the album is over — per­haps it is just a matter of not being able to get thoroughly enthralled by these time signatures and big band arrangements. Another nagging suspicion is that, as the years go by, David wants to share more and more of his accumulated political wisdom with us, and though he takes extreme lyrical care so as not to sound too preachy or straightforward, ʽTwistinʼ In The Windʼ is still an inescapable rant against political bigwigs and ʽMonkey Manʼ is still a rant about the mistreatment of war veterans (remember, the album was released right after the Gulf War), and somehow it feels like fairly shallow pickings for a character of Byrneʼs level of depth. It happens to us all — he was probably undergoing the same loss-of-sharpness phase here that occurred, for instance, in Ray Davies sometime in the early Seventies — and it did not hit David as harshly as it hits many of us, but still, thematically Uh-Oh feels like a walk in the park next to, say, Fear Of Musicʼs trip through the most inner depths of your subconscious.

Nevertheless, tripping through your subconscious is not necessarily incompatible with a pleasant walk in the park — and for those who thought, for instance, that Rei Momo was OK, but placed too much emphasis on the Brazilian carnival thing, Uh-Oh might turn out to be the superior proposition. At any rate, it has excellent production, features enough diversity, is sufficiently smart, funny, and sentimental in places, and profoundly offends the Church with its album cover: what else should one look for in a solo David Byrne album?

David Byrne: Rei Momo

DAVID BYRNE: REI MOMO (1989)

1) Independence Day; 2) Make Believe Mambo; 3) The Call Of The Wild; 4) Dirty Old Town; 5) The Rose Tattoo; 6) Loco De Amor; 7) The Dream Police; 8) Donʼt Want To Be A Part Of Your World; 9) Marching Through The Wilderness; 10) Good And Evil; 11) Lie To Me; 12) Office Cowboy; 13) Women Vs. Men; 14) Carnival Eyes; 15) I Know Sometimes A Man Is Wrong.

General verdict: More or less what happens when you relocate a consummate NYC dweller to Havana or Rio de Janeiro, and then force him at gunpoint to blend in with the locals. Except thereʼs no gun.

Well, looks like it took our friend David a decade and a half of artistic work to get to the main point of it all, which he bravely states in the opening lines of the opening track of his official full-fledged solo debut: "Now and then I get horny — at night you do". Like, we could only guess previously that all that incredible Talking Head bliss was just sublimated expression of pent-up sexual energy, because there was no way in hell that a guy like David Byrne could ever hope to get laid; and, funny enough, how coincidental is it that the bandʼs music began to calm down and smooth out at about the same time that the man finally started dating? (Honestly, though, I have no idea when or how David lost his virginity, and I donʼt think I want to know).

Anyway, itʼs not like Rei Momo is any more specifically autobiographic or confessional than any other Talking Heads or solo David Byrne album; it is simply that with age comes a natural desire to get more serious, philosophical, and introspective, and what better way to involve you in your philosophical conceptions than by saying "we know what will make us happy, we know what will ease our pain"? ...and no, he ainʼt talking about universal peace or transcendental meditation, if you know what I mean. There does seem to be a fairly strong theme of male / female relationship running across the entire record — even the sequencing of the titles matters, from ʽWomen Vs. Menʼ to the tellingly closing ʽI Know Sometimes A Man Is Wrongʼ — but surely this is nothing new to those who had been following David through the years and seeing him gradually mellowing out and morphing his lyrical hero from paranoid asshole to quirky penitent.

What is somehow, if not definitively, new about Rei Momo is Byrneʼs decision to fully embrace the trend of «world music» and make a record that would go beyond carefully synthesizing Anglo-American pop genres with musical styles outside of that region and simply dive into that style pool head first. This time, though, his primary inspiration would be Latin America rather than Africa: each song on the album is based on one or more traditional dance genre from the Caribbean or Brazilian area, ranging from common forms like samba or cha-cha-cha to ever more rare variations (like the Puerto Rican mapeyé). Assisting him in this endeavor is, predictably, an enormous bunch of South American musicians — I counted around 50 names in the credits — and, for some reason, the English-Scottish singer Kirsty MacColl, who largely just sings back­ground vocals but does so on at least half of the tracks. Perhaps David thought that a random Transatlantic touch like that was just the right flourish on the way to total perfection.

With this kind of record always naturally comes the question — does the artist do this in a perfunctory manner, driven more tightly by an intellectual desire to step out of his comfort zone and pay a liberal tribute to the «underdog section» of the planet, or does he do this out of actual untainted emotional love for this kind of music that came to him naturally and without any sort of preplanned calculation? In the hypersensitive world of the 21st century, both types of situations are often indiscriminately confused and slapped with the unwashable stigma of «cultural appropriation», one of the most stupid terms that the art of political correctness has ever come up with; but any truly reasonable person would point out that only the first type deserves proper castigation — though, admittedly, it may be very hard to objectively distinguish between the two without a very detailed study of the matter.

Rei Momo should probably remain on the safe side. After all, it represents a fairly natural evolution of Byrneʼs musical tastes — in fact, there is a very smooth road that leads to it from Naked, which, in turn, is the logical successor to True Stories and Speaking In Tongues, and so on. Admittedly, the wholesale shift to Latin America is a bit unexpected, but since most of those genres are rooted in African music as well, it may have been only a matter of time before David switched from Fela Kuti to Jorge Ben as a major source of inspiration. And even if, this time around, the instrumental tracks bear no traces whatsoever of Talking Head history, the vocals and the words attached to the vocals certainly do. Think of this as a situation where The Byrne City Dweller is suddenly forced to relocate from his NYC comfort zone to the hot open spaces of Rio de Janeiro, where they do not typically play any of that gringo rock music.

It certainly helps that quite a few of the songs are still well written and work fine as intelligent pop songs with hooks rather than meaningless dance grooves where rhythm, energy, and hot sex drive is all that matters. Not that there ainʼt plenty of rhythm and energy in these grooves, but I think — far from being an expert on samba, mambo, and salsa — I think that if you really want to shake your booty off with vehemence, you are much better off with the real thing, your possible lack of knowledge of Spanish and/or Portuguese notwithstanding. Here, the samba and mambo rhythms, while done professionally and authentically, are still subjugated to ideas of melodic hooks and catchy choruses on subjects that are quite far removed from the typical lyrical subjects of Latin American pop music (i.e. love, poverty, revolution, and more love). But there is also something about Byrneʼs voice and personality that makes it a natural fit for these arrangements, something that could not have been provided by the likes of, say, Mick Jagger or even David Bowie, whose inescapable Englishness would definitely mar the landscape. Byrne, with his fairly cosmopolitan voice and the ability to combine college-style intelligence with hyperbolic emotionality, fits this musical costume like a glove.

Take something like ʽDirty Old Townʼ, for instance. It is a friendly salsa, with all the expected brass and percussion support you could ask for, but its memorable chorus is the same old mix of desperation and hope that we still remember from Little Creatures and its anthems such as ʽRoad To Nowhereʼ: "We wanna live in a dirty old town / Building it up, tearing us down" — the music and the lyrics help each other nicely, the former supporting the latter with good rhythm and energy and the latter ennobling the former in much the same way as, say, Bob Dylanʼs lyrics around 1963 helped enliven and deepen the traditional folk patterns.

Some ideas seem to just come out of nowhere, but are still fun: ʽThe Dream Policeʼ, for instance, is a personal favorite of mine — a cute, leisurely cha-cha-cha number with a delightfully seductive brass riff at the center, and, for no reason at all, a vocal delivery that has to count as one of the sweetest Big Brother confessions on record: "We are the watchdogs of your mind / We are the dream police", rendered in the sexiest falsetto that Mr. Byrne is capable of. Yes, I think he just woke up one morning and thought, «hey, wouldnʼt it be cool to write a song about dream control and set it to a Cuban dance track?» (No offense to Fidel Castro intended, Iʼm sure). Some tracks could actually trigger a different kind of police in our times — ʽOffice Cowboyʼ, a pagode by definition, seems to be about sexual harassment at the workplace, at least in the beginning, before the lyrics take an even whackier turn. Some are about Lord-help-me-if-I-know-what, like ʽRose Tattooʼ, which may refer to the Tennessee Williams play, but may as well absolutely not; in any case, the sentimental, but bitter-powerful chorus is impressive enough even if you do not understand a word of it.

I could not honestly admit that any of the tracks is singularly overwhelming; the synthesis works in general, but the songs flow so smoothly that nothing in particular stands out. I tend to favor the «darker» bits, such as the slightly sinister atmosphere of ʽWomen Vs. Menʼ ("no one knows how it started / and God knows how itʼll end / the fightinʼ continues / women versus men" seems to have majorly increased in relevance since 1989), but if you are not on your third or fourth attentive listen, you might not even notice that there are bits that sound more sinister than others. In any case, Rei Momo as a whole is a success — it may have been somewhat arrogant for Byrne to crown himself as the King of the Carnival, but it is his personal carnival, after all, and if fifty or so musicians from those fine traditions all agreed to take part in his social, philosophical, and (figuratively!) sexual fantasies, we may assume, with reasonable safety, that it wasnʼt all about the money. A fun experience overall, although it also confirmed that Byrne would never again be returning to the fight for awesome monumentality — not with the Heads, not on his own. 

David Byrne: The Knee Plays

DAVID BYRNE: THE KNEE PLAYS (1985)

1) Tree (Today Is An Important Occasion); 2) In The Upper Room; 3) The Sound Of Business; 4) Social Studies; 5) (The Gift Of Sound) Where The Sun Never Goes Down; 6) Theadora Is Dozing; 7) Admiral Perry; 8) I Bid You Goodnight; 9) Things To Do (I've Tried); 10) Winter; 11) Jungle Book; 12) In The Future; 13*) Tree (reprise); 14*) (I've Tried) Things To Do; 15*) Tic Toc 2 (In The Future); 16*) Whisper; 17*) Misterias; 18*) Faust Dance; 19*) Ghost; 20*) Super Natural.

General verdict: If a brief history of American popular music in the form of sax-trumpet-trombone trios is your thing, this is a great album. If it is not, it is still a David Byrne album.

This was a very interesting (sub-)project which, unfortunately, does not make for truly great entertainment — but is well worth hearing at least once. Still not ready for a proper solo album, David spent part of 1984 working for director Robert Wilson, providing a series of musical interludes for his gargantuan opera, the CIVIL warS (hope I got all the caps right). In doing so, he had to live up to the potential of such avantgarde giants as Philip Glass and Gavin Bryars, which may be the reason why Wilsonʼs original design was for Byrneʼs pieces to serve as links («knee plays») between the major themes. Ultimately, however, since the opera was never performed in its entirety (or even fully completed, for that matter), The Knee Plays premiered on its own, as a stand-alone piece, in April 1984, and was released as an LP the following year (titled Music For The Knee Plays and featuring a slightly abbreviated set; in 2007, Byrne finally released the whole thing on CD, adding eight more bonus cuts and simply calling it The Knee Plays).

Although the opera was supposed to have something to do with the American Civil War, there is nary a hint of the Civil War in the music — or, for that matter, in the dancing program that it was supposed to accompany, largely influenced by traditional Japanese theater and featuring nine dancers in white doctorʼs smocks. That said, the music is definitely American in nature, with New Orleanian brass bands taken as the major influence, and the melodies covering jazz, blues, marching band, and even doo-wop territory. Clearly the most unusual feature is that, percussion aside, all the music is being provided by brass instruments alone — no fewer than sixteen musicians are credited for saxophone, trumpet, and trombone parts (fortunately, not all of them are playing at once), while Byrne either keeps silent or recites, rather than sings, his lyrics against the melodies. Yes, the effect is precisely as schizophrenic as it sounds.

In all honesty, I suspect that Byrne intentionally took up this challenge so that he could make the least Talking Heads-like album imaginable — though, in order to succeed even better, he should have invited Bob Dylan to perform lead vocals (which is actually not a crazy idea at all), and he should have included more tracks like ʽThings To Do (Iʼve Tried)ʼ, apparently a traditional spiritual number rearranged for Byrneʼs brass band, meaning that most of the other music is still too broken-up and jerky in the finest of Talking Headsʼ traditions. That said, it is still a perfect cold shower after the Marathon experience of Stop Making Sense — and, dare I say it, not the most enjoyable, or even the most understandable, cold shower in the world.

Arguably the most, if not the only, properly memorable track on the album is the final entry on the original LP — ʽIn The Futureʼ. Like most of the vocal numbers, its musical structure is elementary (two or three very simple brass phrases from the jazz-pop idiom overlapping each other), and the emphasis is on Byrne as he lays down one forecast after another — "in the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes", "in the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat", "in the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed"... The hilarious thing about this dead-pan delivery, of course, is that he seems to be collating together all possible prognoses — optimist, pessimist, idealistic, cynical, techno­phile, apocalyptic — which is a natural thing for his stage character, suffering from personality disorders, splits, paranoia, and paralyzing indecision... wait, no, this is not the most hilarious thing. The most hilarious thing is that so far, out of all these forecasts, only one — the very last one to be spoken — has come true: "In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it".

Other than that particularly striking performance, The Knee Plays is really all about the strange atmosphere. ʽTree (Today Is An Important Occasion)ʼ introduces the proceedings with a three-note melody that is part royal fanfare, part New Orleanian funeral ceremony, and everything that follows sounds like a band of little tin soldier men with brass instruments, all pulled by Byrneʼs subtle invisible strings. They are not playing anything particularly challenging: the melodies are really quite traditional, sometimes going as far as to delve into Bulgarian folklore (ʽTheadora Is Dozingʼ) or Les Baxter-ish exotica (ʽJungle Bookʼ), but more often staying within the safe confines of jazz-pop. The weirdness comes from banning all the instruments except the brass ones, and from Byrneʼs occasional (and always mentally disjointed) narrations.

It is up to the art lover to decide whether this «grooveless» approach to music-making, coming from one of the finest groovemakers in pop history, is acceptable or not. In my opinion, the value of these pieces is more intellectual and symbolic, and they should be valued on the same plane as modern art installations; also, I feel as if there may be some serious waste of talent here (most of the tracks are too minimalistic in nature to really warrant the presence of so many professional jazz musicians). But at least the album definitely deserves to be heard, if only because it truly sounds like nothing else ever recorded — not by a pop artist, at least. And this leaves plenty of room for your personal interpretations and associations.

David Byrne: The Catherine Wheel

DAVID BYRNE: THE CATHERINE WHEEL (1981)

1) Light Bath; 2) His Wife Refused; 3) Ade; 4) Walking; 5) Two Soldiers; 6) Under The Mountain; 7) Dinosaur; 8) The Red House; 9) Wheezing; 10) Eggs In A Briar Patch; 11) Poison; 12) Cloud Chamber; 13) Black Flag; 14) My Big Hands (Fall Through The Cracks); 15) Combat; 16) Leg Bells; 17) The Blue Flame; 18) Big Business; 19) Dense Beasts; 20) Five Golden Sections; 21) What A Day That Was; 22) Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open); 23) Light Bath.

General verdict: An uneasy, but ultimately efficient marriage between Eno's ambient soundscapes and Byrne's funky paranoia.

If there is one particular art in this world about which I understand absolutely and utterly nothing, it is the art of dancing; for all I know, any dancing in the world might be about architecture, or about life insurance, or whatever. Fortunately, in order to enjoy David Byrne's first solo album, one does not at all need to process the information that it was specially commissioned by the famous dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp — for one of her very first and most critically acclaimed Broadway performances. Just like the Heads, Twyla, too, was based in New York, and there is nothing surprising about her interest in Byrne as a musical partner, what with the perfect modern synthesis of brain and body stimuli in the Heads' music.

What is actually more surprising to me is how all these early solo projects were still so strongly intertwined, despite all the alleged animosity between individual band members. Here, we have Jerry Harrison assisting Byrne on several of the tracks, although, admittedly, there are no signs of Chris or Tina — however, Eno is playing bass and keyboards, and then there is the ubiquitous Adrian Belew, who somehow managed to contribute to all the solo projects of the Heads in that very productive year of 1981, before finally picking up his checkbook and making the move to King Crimson territory. This ultimately makes The Catherine Wheel the closest in sound to a bona fide Talking Heads album, although the instrumental and snippet-ish nature of many of the tracks only really allows to place it on the «auxiliary» shelf.

Originally, the album was released in a shortened LP version, which only included most of the long, self-sustained compositions; and in a longer cassette version, which also included all the brief snippets for the suite — in the CD age, the cassette version became the default one, though I would guess there'd be no serious harm done anyway, were you to shear away all the brief inter­ludes. Most of the numbers are purely instrumental, but there is a small bunch of vocal songs, and these typically seem to be the important centerpieces: particularly ʽWhat A Day That Wasʼ, a classic Byrne-style paranoid tribute to our mad mad world and the album's one nearly-complete quasi-Heads masterpiece — something that was so clearly understood, they later went to the trouble of beefing it up with the full support of the band's powerhouse rhythm section (here, the bass and drums clearly sound underwhelming) and including it into the setlist for Stop Making Sense, where it became one of the highlights. (The grim funk rocker ʽBig Businessʼ would also be performed at the same show, but you can only see it as a bonus track on the DVD release).

Overall, however, the main problem of The Catherine Wheel is precisely the same as it was with Harrison's solo debut: it sounds way too much like a slightly undercooked regular Heads album — too much to stir up extra curious interest, yet not enough to make the experience just as exciting as it was with Remain In Light or Speaking In Tongues. Case in point: ʽHis Wife Refusedʼ, a song that immediately brings on associations with ʽOnce In A Lifetimeʼ by merely having the words "wife" and "house" in it, features an impressive and astounding amount of odd guitar and keyboard sounds in it, sometimes up to the point of sounding like two or three swarms of alien bees from distant planets fighting over new territory. But as a song, it is not particularly memorable — no anthemic chorus, no fresh hook other than David, in his usual tone / style, delivering short bursts of hysterical emotion. There are also severe problems with self-repetition: ʽBig Blue Plymouthʼ, directly stepping on the toes of ʽWhat A Day That Wasʼ, is pretty much the same song, just a little bit louder, but with the same dynamics — a tense-'n'-nervous verse gallop resolving into an anthemic chorus with dreamy back harmonies.

This is why the long version of the album, with all the atmospheric snippets, is actually better: these tiny bits of ambience constitute the record's experimental core and explore an impressively diverse array of styles. Some of the tracks are purely atmospheric, somewhat in the manner of Eno's Another Green World (ʽCloud Chamberʼ, with its nice synergy between clinky percussion and heavenly synth tones); some are in the avantgarde-minimalism vein (ʽCombatʼ, with several simple bass, piano, and guitar lines playing the quirky dissonance game with each other); some can only be described as bits of psycho-pastoral jamming (ʽAdeʼ — possibly named after Belew, though he is not credited for the writing). Nothing is particularly great in itself, but taken together, this little collection of melodies and atmospheres is fun, pleasant, and, most importantly, is a good case of several distinctly talented people pooling their ideas together, rather than sticking to a set formula.

Compared to Byrne and Eno's other joint project from the same year (My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts — previously reviewed in the Eno section), The Catherine Wheel is nowhere near as groundbreaking — not that it was ever supposed to, being, after all, a specially commissioned side project for somebody else — but it is still a piece of work that will be of interest to fans of both Byrne and Eno, because no other record in the world sounds so much like a chemical synthesis of Fear Of Music with Another Green World. Come to think of it, Fear Of Another Green World would have been a much better title for this thing than the symbolic reference to a set of fireworks, even if it may have inspired the name for one of the 1990's most quintessential shoegazing outfits.