The 1981 Listening Post - David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel

 David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel

#751

By Paul Zickler

David Byrne

Songs From The Catherine Wheel

Genre: Soundtrack Artifact

Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Paul’s Rating: 3.75 our of 5

Highlights: 

His Wife Refused

My Big Hands (Fall Through the Cracks)

Eggs in a Briar Patch

What a Day That Was

Review:

“The Catherine Wheel” was a collaboration between David Byrne and choreographer Twyla Tharp. It debuted at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York in September of 1981 and was performed a total of 12 times as part of Tharp’s season of Broadway dance productions. Also included were shows featuring the music of Bruce Springsteen, Supertramp, and the Beach Boys. One of the pieces from the original Byrne ballet -- titled “The Golden Section” (after the gold-colored costumes of the dancers) -- was later performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “The Catherine Wheel” was well reviewed: The New Yorker mentioned “dancing of astonishing beauty and power,” and the New York Times remarked, “the choreography is Miss Tharp at her best.”

So then there’s this album. I mean, can you call it that? Isn’t it just some songs given to a choreographer by the lead singer of a pop group? You might think so, if you knew nothing about Talking Heads, nothing about David Byrne, and even more crucially, nothing about Brian Eno.

Yeah, did I mention Eno produced this? I mean, it was 1981 and it was David Byrne, so it probably goes without saying. But just to confirm, here are the musician credits for a couple of the tracks:

Eggs In A Briar Patch

Bass, Vibraphone [Vibes] – Brian Eno

Drum [Gung Gong] – John Chernoff

Guitar [Floating Guitars] – Adrian Belew

Keyboards – Jerry Harrison

Performer [Horses] – David Byrne

Cloud Chamber

       Drum [Large Drum] -- Jerry Harrison

       Percussion [Kitchen Metals] -- David Byrne

       Performer [Water Pot] -- Twyla Tharp

So is it a forgotten Talking Heads masterpiece, or is it My Life In The Bush of Ghosts Part 2? Sadly, it’s neither. There’s clearly the African polyrhythmic influence that animated Remain in Light, here more explicitly attributed to John Miller Chernoff, who goes from being a huge influence to an actual collaborator -- Chernoff plays congas on a couple of tracks and even gets a writing credit for “Big Business.” There are definitely some Bush of Ghosts-style experimental pieces, including “Briar Patch” with its eerie/silly spoken voice sample (“Unsaved people don’t have any means of deliverance. None!”). There are also some actual songs: “His Wife Refused,” “My Big Hands (Fall Through the Cracks),” “Poison,” “Big Blue Plymouth.” Each one feels like it would have fit somewhere in the band’s discography. In fact, “What a Day That Was” actually ended up on Stop Making Sense, albeit in a far more exciting live band version. 

Actually, listening to that song really brings out why this album isn’t more interesting. Sure, Jerry plays on some songs, Belew’s weird guitars are all over the place, and Bernie Worrell adds some funky clavinet. But no Chris and no Tina. None of the incredible manic energy of the 1980 tour. Nothing that rivals the spacey computer perfection of Remain in Light. 

It’s possible that Byrne & Eno saw this as another opportunity to mess around and make something magical. Thing is, lightning rarely ever strikes twice. I can certainly imagine this as the soundtrack to a very cool modern dance show, but am I going to put it on and listen intently the way I would to Fear of Music? Nope, not likely. Might I put it on as background music to some creative project I’m working on? Maybe. But why would I, when Bush of Ghosts exists? I’d probably go so far as to throw “His Wife Refused” and “My Big Hands” onto a Spotify playlist, but that’s about it.

Calling it an album just invites comparison with the otherworldly stuff David Byrne was responsible for during this incredibly fertile period of his life. It’s safer to just see it as an artifact of that period, an interesting project, a soundtrack. Viewed on those terms, it works just fine.

https://open.spotify.com/album/5DyoXk3EjmrhbqUv0FiFA6?si=8UIlXllKRMevgEdxBZL5gw

The 1980 Listening Post - Talking Heads - Remain in Light

Talking Heads - Remain in Light 

#403

by Paul Zickler

Talking Heads

Remain in Light

Genre: Electronic New Wave Funky Dystopia

Allen’s Rating: 5 out of 5

Paul’s Rating 5 out of 5

Highlighteds:

Born Under Punches

Crosseyed and Painless

Once in a Lifetime

Seen and Not Seen

Listening Wind

Review:

(Note: Since this record has been so fundamental to my life, I reluctantly decided to forego personal history and attempt to narrate the experience of just listening with headphones on.)

Side 1 opens with an aural punch to the gut (Ah!), and then we’re inside a computer. David Byrne’s speaking character (call him DB) orders us to “Take a look at these hands!” He’s a government man, a tumbler, so thin. A soothing set of voices reasonably asks to breathe, punctuated by the more insistent DB commenting in the margins. The lyrics intrigue: “Falling bodies tumble ‘cross the floor,” while DB tartly replies, “Thank you,” and “No thanks.” “Don’t even mention it.” The instrumental solos imitate computer diodes, punctuated by yelping and gurgling. The vocal melody repeats: “The heat goes on,” later looping over “Won’t you breathe with me?” The whole thing feels incredibly unsettling. Something is about to break, but we can’t figure out what it is, or if it even matters. Born Under Punches maintains its edge for a thrilling near six minutes, then fades out, never resolving. It builds suspense for what comes next and sets up the experience of the entire album perfectly. 

Tracks 2 and 3 are built on grooves that might have fit on “Fear Of Music,” but here they’re not only augmented by Eno electronica, but also heavier and funkier. Guitar sounds slink and slide from ear to ear. Polyrhythms dare you not to shake your ass, while lyrics dance just outside your consciousness. Again, something’s going on, but it’s not clear what. DB informs us that “Facts don’t do what I want them to…Facts just twist the truth around…” on Crosseyed and Painless, and “Seems like the world knows nothing at all” on The Great Curve. Both songs incorporate overlapping lines that could serve as warnings, orders, or even a strange kind of rejoicing; eventually everything is unintelligible and repeats almost to the point of annoyance, then the guitar takes over and attempts to drive us off the edge of a cliff. Exhilarating.

Forget the video for a moment, and just listen to Once In A Lifetime. Putting the song in headphones is a reminder of how incredibly well produced and arranged it is. We’re surrounded by a sea of synth textures; thumped by relentless three-note bass riffs; pelted by percussion above, beside & behind; and attacked by DB’s infamous evangelist. It’s all in second person, too. It’s not the preacher, it’s YOU saying to yourself, “My God, what have I done?!” Almost 4 minutes in, the guitars arrive to rescue us from drowning, but DB won’t let up. “Here comes the twister,” he declares during the fadeout. “Same as it ever was.” We have been warned.

Side 2 immediately feels different. “I knew my heart was in the right place,” DB narrates over a less threatening, more chatty groove. The memory of a thousand years gives way to present tense: “I’m walking along, I’m thinking about things in motion.” Two funky guitar riffs - one tentative, one pushy - accompany a sung duet between high and low octaves. Then an elephant enters and does a strange dance. We pass by minarets, market stalls, Houses in Motion. We could almost get comfortable here. 

Storytime continues with a long narration about an unnamed protagonist, a thought experiment that works so well because it’s delivered over the most melodic groove on the album. Seen And Not Seen feels more structured and orderly than anything we’ve heard so far, but it ends with a chilling twist. “He wonders if he too might have made a similar mistake.”

The seemingly mellow flow and storytelling mode continues, but instead of philosophically musing, Listening Wind follows a character on a mission, delivering a package to “the American man” whose presence represents disruption and despair for his people. Calling his friend the wind to guide him, he plants devices in the free trade zone. Listen closely and those seemingly random synth bleats become sinister, the gliding rhythm a false lull preceding the blasts that will justifiably blow the unwanted intruders to kingdom come. It takes awhile to realize they are us.

The sense of foreboding that began the album hits home in the final song, but not in the way we might have expected. “Terrible signal too weak to even recognize... I’m touched by your pleas...” Byrne sings over the most droning, least grooving track of all. “A change in the weather… The center is missing…” he continues. Our spoken narrator, DB, is nowhere to be found. Those mostly backgrounded noises from before emerge front and center, revealing themselves as aspects of an inevitable future. “The gentle collapsing of every surface. We travel on the quiet road… The Overload.” This computer we’re inside is slowly breaking down, and our world with it. Quietly, gradually, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and then it all fades away.

“Remain In Light” arrived in 1980 from what felt like a mysterious and distant future, one I couldn’t quite grasp. I still feel the same way listening to it 40 years later. 

https://open.spotify.com/album/1JvXxLsm0PxlGH4LXzqMGq?si=viVHGqz9RPa1y5SPmF-Pvg

 

The 1986 Listening Post - Talking Heads - True Stories

#429/2108

October 7 1986

Talking Heads

True Stories

Genre: A lot better than i’d heard it would be

4 out of 5

Highlights:

Love for Sale

Puzzlin’ Evidence

Wild Wild Life

I used to love Spy Magazine. I think I read every issue for about a year. One article I clearly recall (not the details of which, though) was a comparison between two Davids whose names were synonymous with violent homicide: Davids Lynch and Byrne. That cracked me up and I can’t think of either without bringing it to mind ever since. 

Byrne’s been in the spotlight lately, with a very funny turn on John Mulaney’s The Sack Lunch Bunch and an appearance on SNL. I guess he has something to promote. 

I absolutely adored the last few Heads offerings. We all know how great Stop Making Sense was. It made sense, to me at least, that Byrne would venture into other forms of media presentation at some point. But the thing is, he’s not really funny, nor does he engender any real human emotions or connection so the best he can hope to offer is some detached irony. Which is what I always got from this movie. A movie that I only saw pieces of because I couldn’t stick with it. I have no idea if there’s a plot or it’s just a series of videos or what. 

And this was the record, which, for better or worse, never presented as an actual Heads album but, to me, came across as a movie Soundtrack. And that’s why I stayed away. 

Much of this sounds like recent Talking Heads songs redux but, honestly, I prefer that to 90% of what I’ve been listening to lately. 

And Radiohead named themselves after a song on this thing. 

It’s a wild, wild life. 

https://music.apple.com/us/album/true-stories-bonus-track-version/124911522

The 1985 Listening Post - Talking Heads - Little Creatures

Talking Heads - Little Creatures

#206

June 10 1985

Talking Heads

Little Creatures

Genre: Rock

4.5 out of 5

Highlights:

And She Was

Give Me Back My Name

The Lady Don’t Mind

Stay Up Late

Road to Nowhere

It was the end of sophomore year and I was reading a newspaper on the subway platform. The reviewer was talking about this record and, specifically, how it seemed that David Byrne had finally learned to trust himself as a singer. 

I never forgot that review. Just one of those things that stayed with me. And then the video for “And She Was” hit and it was so forward thinking and edgy. The song was sparse and catchy and the video was cluttered but just as catchy. 

The entire album is that. These aren’t just rhythm riffs over which songs were crafted. They are actually songs designed to be played as songs not as jams. It’s refreshing. In a way this is Talking Heads’ Heartbeat City. One delicious track after another.

And, yeah yeah, I know, “Stay Up Late” is the goofiest thing I’ve ever highlighted. And I like it better than every track on Fables of the Reconstruction. I never ever thought of David Byrne as someone who knew how to laugh. This track proves me wrong. 

And, “Road to Nowhere” is the climax to their career: A wholly accessible tune, enjoyable by anyone who listens, pop rock ear candy, with weird growls built on a steady parade snare march. And yet, it never is anything other than a Talking Heads tune. 

Excellent.

https://music.apple.com/us/album/little-creatures/302136342

The 1984 Listening Post - Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense

Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense

#270
October 15 1984
Talking Heads
Stop Making Sense
5 out of 5

Highlights:
The whole thing.
Psycho Killer
Swamp
Slippery People
Burning Down the House
Girlfriend Is Better
Once in a Lifetime
What a Day That Was
Life During Wartime
Take Me to the River



It's my list, dammit and we are going to listen to this album if for no other reason than we need a palette cleanser for some of the garbage we have had to sit through. (This is just the LP release, fyi)
I know, we don't do live albums but this one is special. In its own way it's a different beast than just a "live album", it's a New Wave reckoning, a genre validator, the album that made people understand that there was a new sound out there and that was part world beat, part performance art, part rock, part party. In one fell swoop, the Heads wiped away all the corporate ideas and clamor for sales and radio play and made it safe for something different.
This is, if I may, the bridge between Duck Rock and Graceland and yet unlike both of those records while wholly similar.
Oh my non-existent god, this is spectacular.
I need to interject by stating that I have not always loved the Heads. In fact, it's not until Remain in Light that I actually gave them a rating higher than a B+ and I really didn't care for Fear of Music (I know, I know...shut up).
But, let's be clear, Remain, Tongues and even Little Creatures are some of the best American music of the era.
But, you can't really talk about Talking Heads without mentioning Stop Making Sense. Not the film, which I LOVED and watched just a couple weeks ago. No, the album. Because a band which always came across as slightly calculating and precise and the opposite of "loose" put their money where their artsy fartsy mouths were and showed what they could do.
It's electric. You can't not move to it. It's the Pringles of New Wave music, once I start, I can't stop.
Highlights?
The entire record.
Jeez, just listen to that percussion on "Slippery People".
And, even though I butchered it live, backed by the game band, "The Andersons" at a Wheat From Chaff festival, "Life During Wartime" remains one of my favorite songs of all time.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/stop-making-sense-live-special-new-edition/290073030

The 1983 Listening Post - Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues

Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues

#103

June 1983
Talking Heads
Speaking in Tongues
4.75 out of 5

Highlights:
Burning Down the House
Making Flippy Floppy
Girlfriend is Better
Slippery People
Swamp
This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)

While Talking Heads are better live, more immediate, more funky, they really come into their own here. I don’t know if anyone thought they had this in them, the way Bowie appealing to the masses was a surprise earlier in the year. Also, I’m quite taken with the notion that percussive rhythms are really prevalent in 83. Manfred Mann. Malcolm McLaren. Heads. Others. World Music seems to have overtaken just about everything in this year.
There’s more Tom Tom Club on this album than was apparent before and we are all the better for it.
“Put away that gun, this participle.” Well, that’s what I thought Byrne was saying. :)

As immediately danceable and listenable in 18 as it was 35 years ago.

Plays from Apple Music

Speaking In Tongues

Talking Heads

1.

Listening Post: Talking Heads - David Byrne - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

David Byrne & Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today - 2008

My first exposure to this record was through the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Or Ridiculous things said by ridiculous people in a ridiculous movie). I found the song, "Home" pleasant enough but it reminds me of Beck's "Lost Cause". Both are lovely songs with needless sound effects to distract from the simplicity that they should bathe in. You want very much to like the song, but they are both so over thought that I, at least, find myself angry at them.
Also like Sea Change this is an album of songs. If one was expecting My Life in the Bush of (even more) Ghosts, this is not it. "MY Big Nurse and "One Fine Day" sound like the guitar written compositions they started out as. Something intended for campfire guitar. You expect to see people rocking back and forth under the stars and smiling at each other while canoodling under woven ponchos.
By the third track, "I Feel My Stuff", I find myself totally comfortable with the beat boxes and samples and glicks and chirps. The songs have all been so inviting that the determined weirdness of the piano breaks amidst the shuffling grooves don't bother me as much even as it morphs into a near cacophonic semi-rap. They wash over like soft waves at low tide and the rest is blithely hypnotic.
Marrying Gospel to Experimentalism might seem dicey, but on the title track it comes off as inspiring and saddening. It's a real treat. On previous albums Byrne or Eno or both would just keep on in that direction. Once they grasp on to some motif they tend to not let go. Instead, they turn up the tempo a hair and get us back to the campfire with the horn backed "Life is Long".
Sure, Byrne and Eno can't resist some tribalism as on "Poor Boy", but that's a small price to pay for such an accessible collection.

Everything that Happens....is notable for how Eno and Byrne (Like Radiohead before them) completely embraced the internet and new delivery systems, creating flickr pages and websites that engage the fan, completely eschewing advertising and traditional deliveries. They should be applauded and heralded as leaders. The war for the new music delivery template will be fought on two fronts: Startup bands embracing Facebook and Twitter (Steel Train. fun. Etc) and granddaddies of music who can afford to take these risks. Eno, Byrne, Radiohead, these guys are self-sustaining and can afford to be mavericks and vanguards.
I only wish that people like Bruce Springsteen, who appeal to a broader demographic, would do the same thing. The day of the "label" is over. But music is thriving and as good as it ever was. Not "same". Better.

Grade: A
ASide: Home, Strange Overtones
BlindSide: My Big Nurse, I Feel My Stuff
DownSide: The River

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Naked

Talking Heads - Naked - 1988

Take one part Tom Tom Club's poppines, latter day Heads songcrafting, a little Remain in Light esoteria/polyrhythm dance grooves and swirl it around with soul and you get the last Talking Heads record: Naked.
As opposed to the last two records this was recorded much like Remain in Light, with the band laying down musical beds with guest musicians and then Byrne writing and adding lyrics and melodies later.
The result is a hodgepodge of ideas which sometimes hit (Nothing But Flowers, Blind) and sometimes don't ("The Democratic Circus", what can only be described as a slow jam and near ballad. Two things no one wants from Talking Heads. Some of the time they sound like rewrites of other Heads tunes ("Totally Nude") or they are impenetrable and not very much fun ("Ruby Dear").
"Nothing But Flowers" might be the perfect way for this band to end. The song is about a post-end days world where Byrne is longing for the consumer trappings of the world past. It could be said to be part of a theme. An obvious sequel to "Life During Wartime" and perhaps a companion to "Road to Nowhere". As such, it's one of the best tracks the band has come up with.
The second half of the record shows the band's age. The plodding, dirge-like "The Facts of Life" finds the band struggling to force recharche sounds into previously trod musical territories. It's awful. And it's companioned by another lifeless entry, "Mommy Daddy You and I", a song that tries to be cute in places, but, come on, David Byrne can't pull off cute.
From there on, the album is just one tired motif after another until it finally comes to an end. It's as though the record is just exhausted. Not from overwork but from trying to overthink itself. You've heard it before. Get Remain in Light instead.
Get the single, "Nothing But Flowers" and pass on the rest of it.

Grade: C
ASide: Nothing But Flowers, Blind
BlindSide: Mr. Jones
DownSide: The Facts of Life, Mommy Daddy You and I

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Little Creatures

Talking Heads - Little Creatures - 1985

I was standing on the subway platform, reading the Village Voice, in 1985. There was a review of the new Talking Heads album and the writer, I don't recall who (but it might have been Christgau) wrote about how, for the first time in 6 albums, David Byrne seemed confident enough in his own voice to actually "sing".
The result was the smash hit album, Little Creatures. The one with the big singles on it and the terrific video. You remember it, don't you?

Let's liveblog.

1. And She Was - I hate songs that start with "and". It's a pet peeve. But I love this. This isn't ambient soundscapes. This is a song. With verses and a pre-chorus and a catchy chorus that you want to sing along to. There's a BRIDGE, Goddammit! Terrific.
2. Give Me Back My Name - A haunting piece that reminds me more of something that would show up on REM's Out of Time years later. I think the female vocals would be better with eitehr Excene Cervenka or Kate Pierson. But that's me.
3. Creatures of Love - What is a country song doing on a Talking Heads record? Okay, it's not great and the lyrics are weak, but the pre-chorus and the chorus is fun and its melodious as hell.
By now if you've just tuned in to Talking Heads's catalog you are gonna be in for a shocker if you decide to go back and pick up some of that middle stuff.
4. The Lady Don't Mind - okay, now this is the TH we've come to know. Or at least recognize. That's really misleading, however, because it's the percussion and voodoo guitar that plays over a simple melody. This is vintage TH by arrangement only and when the horns come in, you know it's not the Heads you've known. It's better.
5. Perfect World - Vintage slinky Talking Heads bassline, sweet backbeat, and Byrne's white soul croon. Excellent. Pretty. Perfect.
6. Stay Up Late - Easily one of my favorite Heads tracks of all time. Playful, mischievous, catchy, dark. I love it.
7. Walk it Down - A slowed down "Life During Wartime". Not bad. Not great. The chorus is leaps above the rest of the song.
8. Television Man - uninspired. Inoffensive.
9. Road To Nowhere - Nowhere, indeed. As in, "nowhere in the band's entire catalog of group and solo work was it even slightly suggested they were capable of this. A truly great song, upbeat in sound, kind of harrowing in subject matter. Then again, we are all really on Road to Nowhere, aren't we?

Speaking in Tongues and Little Creatures are two of the best pop/new wave/art rock records of the 80s.

Here's what Christgau said about the album: What the relatively straight and spare approach signifies is that their expansive '80s humanism doesn't necessarily require pluralistic backup or polyrhythmic underpinnings. I don't think I even have the energy to decipher that sentence let alone write it.

Grade: A
ASide: And She Was, Stay Up Late, Road to Nowhere
BlindSide: The Lady Don't Mind, Perfect World

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Sp eak in gi n To ngu es

Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues - 1983

It took a couple years (probably for egos to cool) for Talking Heads to give us some new music. The result was their most audience friendly to date.

One of the things I love about doing these reviews is that it has really allowed me to pull out old records, cassettes, CDs that I haven't given any attention to in ages. If I don't have it, I'm pretty sure I can hear it on Rhapsody or the like (makes me miss LaLa, however....)
I don't think I've listened to my copy of Speaking in Tongues in about 15 years. Maybe more. What I'm really impressed by, in context of these reviews, is how much power Frantz and Weymouth seem to be exhibiting over the proceedings. "Making Flippy Floppy" sounds like a Tom Tom Club song fronted by David Byrne. And that's a pretty big compliment since the weakest thing about TTC was the wispy vocals.
Of course there's the monster track, "Burning Down the House". We all know it. We all saw the video, but I forgot just how aggressive it is. It opens the album with a statement: This is not the ambient Talking Heads you might have gotten used to. These guys are loaded for art-rock bear.
The tribal rhythms continue with "Girlfriend is Better" but it's a sexy track, with a catchy as hell groove. Who knew you could sing along to a Talking Heads song again? It's been ages. The album continues the groovy funkfest with "Slippery People", a song that, if you've heard the Stop Making Sense version, will seem vastly inferior, but is still a dynamite song.
With every successive track it's obvious that the band has come together to do something they had long abandoned since becoming the darlings of the alternative music scene: write songs that people, normal people, can like. they haven't completely forsaken their weirdness. But now it enhances a song like "Slippery People" or "Moon Rocks" instead of being the only thing that matters.
Whereas songs like "Swamp" and "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" would never be found anywhere on the previous Eno-produced Talking Heads records. In a sense, I kind of feel like Eno was an enabler for Byrne's more esoteric leanings and the lesson of Tom Tom Club brought him back to earth. "Swamp" is more reminiscent of "Psycho Killer" than anything on Remain in Light while the latter is prettier and sweeter than anything in the band's previous catalog.
Speaking in Tongues was a bit hit for a band that no one really thought had it in them. I sure didn't. But I'm glad they made it cause it's fantastic.

Grade: A
ASide: Burning Down the House, Girlfriend is Better, Swamp, This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
BlindSide: Making Flippy Floppy, Slippery People
DownSide: Moon Rocks

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Tom Tom Club - Tom Tom Club

Tom Tom Club - Tom Tom Club - 1981

Ah, piffle.
It's pretty well known that Tina Weymouth was becoming more and more frustrated with the control over Talking Heads that David Byrne was wielding. As though he was the genius and they were lucky to be there.
So, on the side, while he was making My Life and Catherine Wheel, Tina and her husband, Chris Frantz enlisted some other players as well as her sisters and tossed off a bit of Rhythmic dance fluff.
And it's probably been more sustaining for them than anything they've ever done. I mean, come on, "Genius of Love"? How ubiquitous is THAT song???
What they were successful at, more than anything else, was creating a pop version of the tribal musings of Talking Heads. Like TH lite.
Let's be honest here: "Genius of Love" is one of the catchiest tracks of the 80s. Hands down. Just plain fun. And no one, NO ONE ever said that about Talking Heads before.
While there are some dull parts ("L'Elephant" goes on too long and "As Above, So Below" treads dangerously close to experimentation instead of dancey fun) the entire affair is too cute and short to linger too long.

I think of this album as the anti-Remain in Light. Or the anti-My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. It's sort of a triumph that it's paid such dividends for Frantz/Weymouth. While Byrne and Eno were taking themselves SOOOOO seriously, the "lesser" members of the band outdid them with something that everybody liked, everybody bought and everybody danced to. Byrne is what you SHOULD eat. Tom Tom Club is candy.
And sometimes you gotta have a piece of candy.

Grade: B
ASide: Genius of Love, Wordy Rappinghood
BlindSide: On On On On, Booming and Zooming
DownSide: Lorelei

Listening Post: Talking Heads - David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel

David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel - 1981

Ah, the early 80s. When we would all traipse to BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) to see Philip Glass's The Photographer. Or go to the movies to witness Koyaanisqatsi. You could see Laurie Anderson perform or bowl at the University Lanes and we all had a copy of Big Science.
For a couple years it seemed like art had won. And then it all came crashing down with, I think the advent of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous". And art was sent back to where it belonged: in the poverty strewn lines of the decrepit in the East Village.
But, as I said, there was a moment.
And during that time David Byrne was a leader. Talking Heads were bridging pop with art in a way that The Cars only dreamt of. See, TH wasn't gonna sell out and make POP SONGS. They were going to do it on THEIR terms. Well, on Byrne's terms. When he and Brian Eno came out with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts it seemed like the really knew what the world needed. The world of art, that is. Lord only knows what Julie Taymor would have done when presented with the likes of Byrne. But, Twyla Tharp (long before her involvement with Bully Joel's music) jumped on the David Byrne bandwagon and commissioned him to create music for her.
The result was The Catherine Wheel.
From the very beginning couple of tracks I find myself feeling the same way I did in 1984 when I first heard it: I wish I could have seen what this looked like on stage. This music seems so singularly appropriate for dance (where My Life in the Bush of Ghosts certainly did not).
"His Wife Refused" suggests what Byrne was trying to accomplish with lesser musicians that he had been saddled with. But, now with the likes of Brian Eno, Adrian Belew and, yes, Jerry Harrison, Byrne seems like a fuller artist, a dictator, yes, with a singular elliptical and nervous vision.
The music of The Catherine Wheel never suggests that it should be superior to the images that one can lay over it. It's made to be moved to. But it isn't just a series of beats without purpose. It's a soulful, post-punk, proto-funk, purposeful album.
About halfway through, as the ambient dissolved african tapestry starts to get a wee dull, Byrne comes back in full voice with r&b backing on "Poison". The timing couldn't be better. (And it couldn't sound closer to the pop sound his nemeses would be churning out in Tom Tom Club the same year, though nowhere near as accessible and twice as ominous)
Toward the end, after a more and more intensely building ambient climax, we are treated to the song "What a Day That Was", one of Byrne's best tracks and a high point of the Talking Heads live album, Stop Making Sense. And the equally satisfying, "Big Blue Plymouth".
Byrne took everything he's learned over the years with Talking Heads and Brian Eno and art school and made one helluva great soundtrack.

Grade: A
ASide: His Wife Refused, What a Day That Was
BlindSide: Ade, Two Soldiers, Combat, Big Blue Plymouth

Listening Post: Talking Heads - David Byrne - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

David Byrne & Brian Eno - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - 1981

(This review is based on the original vinyl pressing and not the expanded reissue.)

No overview of Eno or Talking Heads would be complete without taking a look at the work they did together in the midst of the Talking Heads career. In a sense, it represents everything Byrne has been trying to accomplish with the heads but was unable to, being dragged down by the albatross that is human beings with, you know, ideas of their own.
The heavy sampling of the record makes it one of the earliest albums to do so with such abandon, creating soundscapes that would become the bread and butter for the likes of Public Enemy and so many others in a couple years. It goes without saying that Byrne wouldn't have been able to complete his masterpiece without the help of Brian Eno who had been turning ambience and sound sculpting to an art form for the previous 5 years before this record was recorded.
What this means is the record is sort of bereft of actual songs. I just mention that because, if you were a Talking Heads fan and you went into this looking for "Life During Wartime" or even "I Zimbra" you're not going to get it. Tracks like "Mea Culpa" sound like they could have just as easily been produced by a young Jean Michel Jarre, if he wasn't so synthesizer obsessed. These are sound pieces with music. Not quite ambient in that they are supposed to flow into the background like "Music for Airports" but more like they are supposed to provide the backing for a high end fashion district shopping experience.
Not a spa, it's too energized for that, demands too much of your participation as a listener, and not a mall, either. But, maybe a high end shop INSIDE that mall. I'm thinking most of "Regiment" as a song I would like playing the next time I'm in Beverly Hills looking for a sports coat. (Which is never)
My Life is probably one of the most important albums of all time inasmuch as it predicated and predicted the explosion of sampling that would come and married that to african rhythms and other third world sounds. Black music could look at My Life as the template for just about everything that was about to come. For that it deserves high marks. I'm not sure when i would ever listen to this record again unless I was painting. Which is something I would like to do someday....
Ultimately, and I know that I am in the minority on this, I find My Life in the Bush of Ghosts supremely unsatisfying. I always have. I get the importance, but I'm not a fan.

Grade: B-
There's really no one better track than the others but...
Aside: The Jezebel Spirit
BlindSide: Mea Culpa, The Carrier
DownSide: A Secret Life

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Remain in Light

Talking Heads - Remain in Light - 1980

David Byrne sounds like a shaman on "Born Under Punches", the opening super-percussive salvo. Only this time I get the real sense that he has, dare I say it, a sense of humor. "Some of you people just missed it!" is a line that just strikes me as funny.
So, I'm reading about Remain in Light and one thing that makes a LOT of sense while listening is that the band, specifically Weymouth and Frantz, were tired of being Byrne's back up band. Which is what they sound like on all the previous records, to me at least. They decided to start working together to create jams, keying off "I Zimbra". And that's very obvious on Remain in Light. "Crosseyed and Painless" has a driving beat and shuffle that makes it ripe for sampling. Talking Heads seem to be even further embracing the burgeoning african music scene, whether, as Wikipedia says, it's because they saw Hip Hop as the future or this was a natural progression from punk/new wave. Some were following Don Letts into Reggae and others were embracing more tribal rhythms. Remain in Light comes out the same year as Adam and the Ants's Kings of the Wild Frontier. I don't think this is an accident. But, Adam's global success is due to his understanding the importance of structure and the Heads refusal to embrace structure. In fact, they seem hell bent on decon-ing the structure whenever possible.
Gosh, just reading about the egos involved here...Eno wanted to be listed as a 5th member of the band. Byrne instructed the designer to credit it as "by David Byrne, Brian Eno & Talking Heads". The arrogance and control freaksim is astounding. Consider: this is a record that is dependent on the interplay between percussion and bass. Without that foundation there is no record. Period.
The lyrics, while they might offer something of interest, are just as often if not more just another instrument. Almost like Byrne and the singers are...speaking in tongues. And yet, there was an attempt to minimize Frantz and Weymouth...
No wonder they created Tom Tom Club.
But, how is the music? Inspired. Take, for instance, "The Great Curve", a masterwork of rhythms, stilleto guitar work (by Adrian Belew), the harmonies, all of them make for one of the best tracks in the band's catalog.
This is also the record with the first bona fide big hit for the band: "Once in a Lifetime". This is the one with the video of Byrne in the big suit. As strange as that video, the song is a slap in the face to consumerism and blind grasping for stature. The mid-life crisis in song. Feels like it. (I can also hear the roots of some of Eno's work with U2 in here) You might find yourself getting annoyed by the end, the polyrhythms never end and each song begins to blend into each other. "The Listening Wind" is a good example of this. But it reminds me instead of the deeper cuts on the Bowie/Eno records of the 70s or even a progression from Eno's Ambient music toward some hybrid animal of base human/programmed fairlight robot. Lose yourself in it. The album's coda "The Overload" could be seen as a sequel of sorts to Bowie's "Warszaw". It's dense, ominous, sad, plodding and funereal. It's unlike anything I've heard from the before or since but that doesn't make it any less powerful. Just...different.

1980 was a great year for music. Adam's Kings. Bruce's The River. Laurie Anderson's O Superman. The Clash's London Calling. And this.
If you only want to hear one Talking Heads record to get a sense of what the band was doing and why they rank so highly in the history of rock if not New Wave and punk, this is the record.

Grade: A+
ASide: Crosseyed and Painless, Once in a Lifetime
BlindSide: Born Under Punches, The Great Curve, The Overload

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Talking Heads - Fear of Music - Fear of Music

"I Zimbra", a percussion heavy, african-rhythm layered song, opens Remain in Light, and, like the first album, suggests a much more accessible experience for the listener than we've been used to from TH. Oh, it's still more concerned with noise-scapes than being a "song", but it makes you want to tap your feet, at least.
Fear not, experimental music lover, "Mind" follows with production that seems to touch on all the tropes of the era. Spacey synth sounds, minimalist spaces between all the notes, vocal gymnastics instead of...um...singing...Byrne and Eno seem determined to turn Talking Heads into a David Bowie-esque art band. It isn't as though the band is afraid of music, per se. They seem to be allergic to songs. "Paper", the first cut that feels like the album is settling into itself, could have easily fallen off Devo's Are We Not Men? (Another Eno produced record). As it progresses, Fear of Music sounds less like an album of songs you would recommend to a friend than a soundtrack to an intense and paranoid urban warrior living in a post-government takeover world. Which may be the intent. Unless I'm reading into things. But "Cities" plays just like that and the very next song, "Life During Wartime" (my personal favorite Heads song ever) is pretty blatant about that subject matter. Which means that I could be right in my interpretation of intent or I let that song inform the rest of the record for me. Either way...The live version is better, the studio version just...peters out...
From there we're back in paranoia land with "Memories Can't Wait", a pulsating, pummeling onslaught of nervosa led by Mr. Gangly Big Suit himself. As it builds it gets more and more tense and results in being one of the only songs on the album not to fade out, but actually end.
Fear of Music pops up on just about every "Best of" list. Whether its the Best of the 70s or all time. I don't agree. I think critics are falling all over themselves to show that they are smarter than the average Kiss listener. They're not. They're buying into pretension as smarts. They are not the same at all.

Grade: C
ASide: Life During Wartime
BlindSide: Cities
DownSide: Mind

Listening Post: Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food

Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food - 1978

Remember when bands gave a shit what their album covers looked like? Sigh...
The reason for the Talking Heads-rospective is because of Eno. I immersed myself in so much of his work (and come to love his work and his ambient work even more) that it seemed only natural, having looked at the album he produced for Devo and covered U2 in the very first Listening Post, that I should jump in to TH. (Another connection: Jerry Harrison, Guitar and Keys for TH, produced Violent Femmes 3rd album.)
More Songs is an album that I actually never heard. My cousin had it, I think. Some roommate in college had it, too. In 198? NY who DIDN'T own it?
Me.
So, what did Eno do? He's got to deal with Warbling Dave up there and it's not like he can just SHOVE him back in the mix. Instead, what you notice on MSAB&F are the drums and bass. The rhythm section is what this album's about. Byrne's still the bug-eyed demento but the band is more cohesive. They don't just exist to serve him and his words. Eno brings them together and a unit of four.
Just as I start to find all the awkwardness a bit unrewarding, in comes "I'm Not in Love" and I'm reminded that the band is more than just a low-fi groove outfit. Now, it's just as straining as the others but it doesn't seem like it's weird for weirdness sake. There's a real sense of trying to accomplish something here.
But nothing on the record prepares you for "Take Me to the River", the old Al Green song. Listening now, it's obviously a companion piece to "Psycho Killer". Maybe it's sung by a victim of the psycho as he's being dragged to his final resting place in some creek somewhere in the pacific northwest.
Works for me.
The album's closer, "The Big Country" is actually a nice little track. A bit of country confection that, to be honest, I would never have expected from them. Well, it's country, run through the hiccuping taffy machine that is David Byrne.

Sidenote: As I read bios for the band while listening to the music I found a quote where David Byrne refers to himself as "Borderline Asperger's, I guess." So, I'm not that far off.

Grade: B+
ASide: Take Me To The River,
BlindSide: Thank You for Sending Me an Angel, The Good Thing

Listening Post: Talking Heads - Talking Heads: 77

Talking Heads - Talking Heads: 77 - 1977

Not THE Talking Heads. Talking Heads. Important distinction. Like Smashing Pumpkins. Not THE Smashing Pumpkins. "Smashing" could be how they look, right?
Talking Heads is more of a commentary on the takeover of television. These are 2nd generation tv people. Still Boomers, but too young to have been the first teenagers. Able to look at the world with cynicism and the soul of artists.
One of the first CBGB breakthrough bands, TH's first album opens with the bouncy "Uh oh, Love Comes to Town" which belies the tact they will take in the future. A peppy little tune for such a smartly cynical band. If Devo were plastic people embracing technology, Talking Heads were their white soul cousins. Not too surprising that Eno would have something to do with both bands at some point.
If you were drawn in by the pop confection opener you were going to be left scratching your head the rest of the way. The album is chock full of nervous energy, herky rhythms and vocal warbles as Byrne just isn't comfortable singing yet.
The Side One closer, "No Confession" is just trying wayyy too hard to be ambitious and different. Side Two attempts to bring us back to pop but "The Book I Read" feels like a deep track and not a single.
By the time you get to the brilliant "Psycho Killer" you're ready for it. Everything has led you there.
Talking Heads, based in NYC, would sort of become the soundtrack for that city in the 80s. One look at movies of the era like Something Wild and you can't miss it. The steel drum sound, the faux-lypso, the appropriated black music by well-intentioned white people, it's a melting pot. In the late 70s punk was embracing reggae, mainly cause punkers were hanging out in clubs where Don Letts was DJing and they fell in love with what he played. Had they not, would the Clash have turned to Reggae?
Would Talking Heads just be an anomaly? I don't know.
The album opens as it closes, bookended by Heads pop. "Pulled Up" is one of the better tracks on the album, forward thinking, energized, I love it.

I heard :77 for the first time in 1982 just before heading off to college. It sounded dated to me then. It still does now.
To be honest, 77 gets a higher rating as a debut than it would if it was just another album.
I liken it to XTC if they were autistic.

Grade: B+
ASide: Uh Oh Love Comes to Town, Psycho Killer
BlindSide: Who Is It?, Pulled Up