Talking Heads
“Yeah…it’s a good job.” – David Byrne
“Your average Ted Nugent fan yanked boogers out of his friend's nose larger than David Byrne, two of them looked like girls, and one of them actually was! Besides...what else should you do with a band with short hair that wears Sears short-sleeved dress shirts, like some Allstate insurance adjuster except beat the ever loving shit out of them while screaming Scorpions songs at the tops of your lungs?” – Capn Marvel
“You, sirs, and your left-wing propaganda are giving honest,
hard-working talking heads like us a bad name.
I guess the real question here is:
why do you hate
Albums Reviewed:
More Songs About Buildings And Food
The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads (2004 Reissue)
Stop Making Sense (Special Edition)
An inspiration to socially awkward art-school nerds everywhere, Talking Heads were probably the most interesting band to emerge from the whole New York CBGB’s “punk” (term used very loosely) scene (beating out Television because they were around for more than two years, the Ramones because they played more than one style of music, Patti Smith because they didn’t suck ass, and Blondie because…christ, you want to say Blondie was more interesting than Talking Heads?). They began playing clean, simple, precise, slightly off-kilter guitar pop in front about ten people as the opening act for the Ramones, and then somehow eventually went on to become worldwide mega-ultra-superduperstars for a time in early-mid-eighties. Their success, moreover, is made all the more impressive by the fact that they were all massively large dorks (especially lead singer David Byrne; check him out being interviewed by David Letterman in 1983 here). I suppose there’s hope for me yet.
Anyway, the seeds of the band were planted when David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth met as freshmen at the Rhode Island School of Design (No shit! RISD! Where Seth Macfarlane went before he created that gawd-awful American Dad show!). Chris and David actually formed a band during their time there called the Artistics, but their meteoric rise was put on hold when David was kicked out of school for being really, really weird. Chris and Tina graduated from RISD in 1974, by which time David, after spending a fair amount of time sucking dicks for coke (Editor’s note: He never actually sucked dicks for coke. In fact, I don’t think you can find a musician less likely to have sucked dicks for coke), had ended up in New York, where Chris and Tina soon joined him. After deciding to form a band but having no luck finding a bass player because everyone probably thought David was too fucking weird, they taught Tina how to play bass and Talking Heads were formed. The lineup swelled to a foursome when Jerry Harrison, who had just returned to college (some place in Cambridge, MA…no, not MIT, the other one…) after being in the Modern Lovers for several years but not actually making an album because Jonathan Richman was also really, really weird, saw the Heads play a show and decided he simply had to bring his guitar/keyboard expertise on board. Despite the simplicity of their early material, the Heads grew more complex and ambitious rapidly, especially once Brian “I likes me the porn!” Eno came on board as producer for their second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food. They embraced “world-beat” (whatever that is) and polyrhythms and all that crazy poop and reached the top of the artistic mountain with 1980’s Remain in Light, which was so absurdly complex it necessitated their touring band’s consisting of roughly 600 people, including Adrian Belew, Bunny Worrell, David St. Hubbins, and Hello Kitty. At this point they dumped Brian Eno, became one of the biggest bands in the world with their 1983 straight-ahead electro-funk album Speaking in Tongues and the concert film Stop Making Sense, then followed that up with a nice, cute pop album that didn’t sell quite as well (Little Creatures). At this point they stopped being both commercially relevant and good, and you should probably avoid their last two records altogether, though to their credit the band never became awful.
The Talking Heads are probably not for everybody, not the least because of their odd duck of a lead singer. To say David Byrne had a unique vocal style would be an understatement. He had a hopelessly nerdy, quivering voice that sounded equally paranoid and screwball singing about paperback books and psycho killers, and he added to this an endless supply of quirky timbres and yelps and crap that made him sound even nerdier than he was, if that was even possible. He was interesting, though, and supremely charismatic, and not once did he contort his voice to sound like Geddy Lee’s, which has to count for something, right? Anyway, behind this skinny geek of a singer was actually an extremely tight band full of lock-step rhythm work and fantastic, interlocking guitars. This tightness is obviously most evident on their debut (since Eno hadn’t taken over yet and the production was so minimal), but, however complex and “out-there” they got (and boy did they), the tight backbone was always there, and they wouldn’t have been able to reach the heights they did without it. Hell, considering how well the band functioned as a unit and the fact that they rarely, if ever, took any solos (Television they weren’t), it’s tough to describe the instrumental talents of the individual members. Together, though, they were fantastic, as a result of which they were an outstanding live band. Plus Radiohead named themselves after a random goof song on one of their crappy albums. How cool is that?
Lineup! Again! From left to right in your picture are drummer Chris Frantz, guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison, lead singer/guitarist David Byrne, and bassist Tina Weymouth. I believe I’ve already said all I need to say concerning these people.
And, onto the reviews!
Talking Heads: 77 (1977)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Psycho
Killer”
Anyone familiar with the multi-layered afro-beat electro-world-crazy-funk these guys became famous for a few years later (or, hell, even if you just know them through “Burning Down the House,” since that’s got all those weird synths and crap in it) will be surprised at how disarmingly simple the debut album from the hyper-masculine proto-Neanderthals that make up Talking Heads is. The one song everyone knows from this record is obviously “Psycho Killer,” right (although to me, as a former (horrendous) member of the Harvard University Marching Band, to hear the bass line played by an actual bass instead of a tuba and the “fa fa fa fa” line actually sung instead of played by a trumpet is quite odd, though that’s really neither here nor there and is only intended to take up space in this crappy review)? Right. What if I told you that, except for the almost multi-part “No Compassion,” that’s probably the most “complicated” song here? You could argue that were Brian Eno to get his hands on some of these things, maybe they’d turn into “Warning Sign” or one of the other songs from the middle of More Songs About Buildings and Food, but really that’s about it. Compared to Fear of Music or (especially) Remain in Light, some of these things sound like goddamn kiddie tunes (I’m looking specifically at the sub-two minute vamp “Who is it?” and its grand total of one lyric here). Sure, they’re sung by a detached, paranoid, ultra-charismatic, freak-boy art student and feature instrumental interplay tighter than [insert offensive joke about nether-regions of young, inexperienced female’s anatomy here], but they’re a bunch of kiddie tunes that all sound the same! So why should I bother?
Because these kiddie tunes are deceptively clever and really fucking good, that’s why, and the aforementioned labial tightness of the instrumental interplay is consistently impressive, despite its admitted sameyness (the only song besides “Psycho Killer” I can tell apart from the rest of this thing is the opener “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town” and its bouncy, groovy pop goodness). The band is basically limited to a dual guitar-bass-drums setup (another reason it’s such a far cry from just about everything else they’d make while they were still good), and while Jerry Harrison plops a piano into the middle of “Tentative Decisions” and keyboards a few other places, “First Week/Last Week…Carefree” features a saxophone solo, and “Uh-oh, Love Comes to Town” has Jamaican kettle drums in it for some reason, this is one of those rare albums that’s good for no other reason than the band in question are good musicians and have written good songs. The amount of needless, show-offy musical goodies numbers somewhere beween zero and none, and how many ostensibly “rock-and-roll” (though you’d be casting a pretty wide net to call this “rock-and-roll”) albums made in the seventies don’t have a single guitar solo in them? At least records made by bands capable of playing guitar solos, that is.
So yes, what we have here is good, simple, yet extremely clever songs, snappy yet not flashy instrumental interplay, and a really cool, charismatic singer. That’s it. Instrumentally, the rhythm section bounces and moves along, playing simple lines in an efficiently crisp manner while David and Jerry trade off heaping loads of pseudo-funk, high-pitched, extremely tight and well-rehearsed chicka-chicka guitar lines, occasionally throwing in an interlocking arpeggio or something. Despite the bare-bones production, they’re often able to work up a nice, groovy little instrumental lather (see “New Feeling” and the closer “Pulled Up,” although the latter is more notable for its almost-punk guitar parts than anything else, considering it’s probably the only song this “punk” band ever recorded with “punk” guitars in it). Sometimes it’s even kinda danceable! Then, over these cool, snappy little instrumental tracks, David Byrne pens all these neat little melodies and sings them as only David Byrne can, and while his pushed-way-up-front, whiny, dorky, alternately ironic and melodramatic vocals may not be everyone’s cup of tea, I find the gobs of personality he brings in trying to capture to thematic essence of every song, no matter how insignificant, just fantastic. And, ofcourse, as I said, it doesn’t hurt that the songs are, you know, good. Beyond the obvious (“Psycho Killer”), personal favorites include the aforementioned “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town,” “Tentative Decisions,” and “Pulled Up,” as well as the not-so-much-aforementioned “The Book I Read” (“NAAAA NAAAAA!!! OHHHHH OHHHHH!!”) and “Don’t Worry About the Government” (“My building has every conveeeenience!”), but really everything is good here. “Who is it?” may be an objectively stupid 100-second vamp with one lyric, but it’s still fun, you know?
As I haphazardly eat the left-over pizza my roommates ordered and I didn’t pay for directly off the pages of my $300 Oxford Latin Giganto-dictionary, I guess what I’m trying to say here is that it’s just about impossible to say anything groundbreaking about this album beyond “gee whiz, these songs are neat.” The production isn’t detailed or all that interesting, but it’s good, and gives all the separate (four) instruments ample space to breathe and stretch about and interlock with each other in interesting ways. The songwriting isn’t crazy or whacked-out or anything close to what we’d be seeing from this band in a few years. It’s just good, you know? Though a smidge off, sure. David Byrne was always a little off, wasn’t he? Like his current obsession with PowerPoint, which for some reason isn’t even remotely surprising to me. But you what? Fuck it! It’s just a nice, snappy, clever, somewhat screwey pop album. The fact is my dog could have reviewed this and given it an 8. Hell, considering the quality of this review, what’s to stop you from saying she didn’t?
More Songs About Buildings And Food (1978)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “The Big
Country”
More of the same and yet not, at all. Brian Eno takes over production duties and helps the band take a bunch of songs that sound like tightier, more interesting versions of stereotypical stuff from the debut, add a bunch of extremely clever mood shifts and production touches and sound effects and crap, and splurch out the most consistently great studio album the Heads ever made. And while I’ll obviously acknowledge the primacy of Remain in Light in the band’s non-live canon, the fact remains that the last ten minutes of that record suck rhinocerous cock, and harping on for two hours about how much “Crosseyed and Painless” blows your mind, dude! will not change that. I love the stuff out of this record, feel it’s often unjustly overlooked in favor of the debut (because it’s the debut so it’s gotta be “groundbreaking,” right? Also notice how I don’t say that the fact that it’s overlooked in favor of Remain in Light is unjust. That thing’s insane), and only wish the Heads could have escaped their tendency to make three quarters of an album sound exactly like itself. What does it say about an album when I can barely tell eight of its eleven songs apart and yet I still give it an extremely praiseworthy 9? Huh? I’ll tell you what! It says it KICKS ASS!
OK, so putting
“Talking Heads” and “KICKS ASS!” in the same paragraph is ludicrous, but this
is one super-strong little record album we have here. The skeletons of most of these songs are
extremely similar to those on ’77,
with the tight, snappy, consistent rhythm section, cleverly interlocking
chicka-chicka pseudo-funk guitars and screwey yet awesome Byrne vocals. That stuff’s all there, so if you enjoyed the
debut you’re already starting off cream cheese.
After that, the tempos of these songs tend to be faster than the ’77 songs, and the subject matter is in
general a little goofier, so as your model take one of the faster, slightly
screwier songs from the debut…“Tentative Decisions,” possibly. Ofcourse, I like that song a lot more than
most people tend to, so maybe you shouldn’t pick a specific analogue. THE POINT IS that, once you’ve taken the
skeletal ingredients of most of the tuneage from the last album, added some
more chicka-chicka guitar shenanigans (which are all over this record like
pubic lice on Kever Federline; witness “Found a Job” for an example of this
“hyper-chicka” style that you might dislike but I don’t mind one bit, thank you
very much), and speeded up the tempo a bit, there’s still a fair bit of
distance between “Happy Day” and “Warning Sign.” The question is…well…how did we get here?
The answer lies in the
production. I really don’t want to be
one of those guys who starts fellating Brian Eno every time he produces a good
record, especially since some of the stuff he does to Fear of Music isn’t really my cup of tea, but the leap in
production from the bare-ass four-piece band of the debut to the awesomely
clever, multi-layered coolness of this record is simply huge. Keyboards of all sorts pop in and out and
provide wonderful layering behind the guitars, strings and massed vocals make
appearances at the most opportune
times, atmosphere is added where there was no atmosphere before, and, well, all
sorts of just really cool stuff happens.
And please don’t think this is just me in one of my idiot “DUHHH, NEAT
SOUNDS! DUHHHH, I LIKE PRODUCTION
TRICKS! DUHHHHHH!” moments, because each
and every little touch was thought out and planned with a great degree of care. They
don’t sound tacked on, you know? All
this stuff fits and really adds to the songs as a whole. Take “Warning Sign,” probably my favorite
song in that giant stretch of eight that all sound like each other. That reverbed “bwoiiiing” snare tone is a perfect fit with the bouncy bass line,
for instance, and then just witness how the song keeps adding all these
additional layers! First some
indeterminate guitar “chick” sounds, then a solitary guitar playing this
descending line that matches both the guitar and bass, then a second guitar taking over the descending line
while the first shifts to this weird little arpeggiated riff that totally
meshes with the descending line before going back to the descending line, before some kind of industrial
whooshing noise leads the song from its happy, bouncy intro to its dark,
fucked-up “WARNING SIIIIGN! WARNING
SIIIIIIGN!” vocal part. The whole thing
is just ace. And this album is full of crap like that, like the massed
vocals in “The Good Thing” and that tinkly piano sound at the beginning of “The
Girls Want to Be with the Girls” (as well as the synth sound later on during
the song that meshes so well with the guitars you can barely tell its there,
yet somehow adds a good deal of depth to the overall sound of the track). I suppose if there’s one song in this great
undifferentiated middle I don’t like as much, it might be “Stay Hungry,” which
has a rather awkward tom-tom-based intro section before going into an
instrumental section that seems to take up half the song. It’s not like it’s bad, though.
For me, though, what makes the album is the three songs that don’t sound like the rest of it. After all, how fun would ’77 really be without “Psycho Killer” at the end? Wouldn’t it be too monotonous and samey? And this album, somehow, is more samey than the debut, despite all the fantastic production, so trust me when I say it needs a two-minute snare-roll-shuffle intro song like “Thank You For Sending Me and Angel” (undoubtedly my second-favorite song on the record…“I’m walking a…ROUND THE WOOOOOORLD here we go!”) and a surprisingly soulful cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” a superb track providing some classy organ sounds, a great little backbeat, and a very welcome change of pace after that eighth consecutive speedy, chicka-chicka nerd track. Heck, the band even got a minor hit out of it! Good for them. Finally, the closing “The Big Country,” maybe my favorite Heads song not on Remain in Light, is what really makes this album for me. And with all this layered (some would say cluttered, so fast and almost panicky is the bulk of the album) pop fun, a simple, languid, slide-guitar-based, country-tinged song about flying over the Midwest takes the cake as the best on the record. It’s wonderful, though. It’s a stunning, big song, and sounds totally out-of-character for this band. Perhaps it’s how Byrne unexcitedly describes “the school and the houses where the kids are, places to park by the factories and buildings, restaurants and bars for later in the evening” and then bluntly croons (and I mean croons) the line “I wouldn’t live there…if you PAID ME TOOOOOOOOOO!”, thus completely turning this big, stirring, uplifting song about “the big country” completely on its “Head” (ha!) by basically saying it’s all boring and it all sucks (and, I mean, it is all boring and it does all suck, especially if you’re a nerdy, arty musician in your 20’s living in Manhattan). Or perhaps it’s just that, even notwithstanding its lyrical content, the song totally rules my ass all the way to next week. Yeah, that’s probably it.
This really is a great album. It’s a little odd and less “traditionally” melodic and catchy than the debut, but once you get into it, it’ll provide you endless hours of quality listening pleasure. It hints at the hyper-complex, mature, layered music the band would soon be producing, but it’s still, for the most part, firmly planted in the screwey, fun, tight, three-minute pop song format of the debut. And when it’s not (“The Big Country,” “Take Me to the River”), it’s aces too, plus that’s when it actually sounds normal. Or whatever “normal” is when you’re discussing the Talking Heads.
Fear Of Music (1979)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Cities”
Points added for being the first album where I can actually tell every song apart, but points deducted for going from the “fun, off-kilter, snappy, poppy screwiness” of the first two albums to “slow, depressing, creepy, atmospheric screwiness.” Eno may have helmed production duties on the last album, but this is the one where the music starts to sounds more like a collaboration between Brian and the Heads (or really just Brian and David) than Brian’s going “hey, let me add a keyboard effect here. It’ll sound ace. But first I’m gonna go look at some freaky porn I just bought.” In the “web-reviewing community,” or at least among the handful of sites I actually peruse on a regular basis, there seem to be two schools of thought on this album. Some are totally won over by the atmospherics, subtle electronics, clever pseudo-concept (you know, add “Fear of…” before the title of each song (“Fear of Animals,” etc.), which actually works like three quarters of the time), and eclectic nature of the record and proclaim it either a) just as good as Remain in Light or b) actually better than its follow-up and therefore the Talking Heads’ best studio album. Others, however, are thoroughly disappointed by the new, gloomy direction the band is taking, dismiss half the album as slow, ugly, depressing crap, and give it something like a low 7.
Because I can’t make a decision, I will do neither of these things, give the album an 8, say it’s “about as good as the debut,” and move on. The thing is I see and understand the arguments for both of these points of view. On the one hand, this is certainly the most thematically and lyrically interesting Talking Heads album (actually not that hard of a contest to win, considering the first two were just kind of screwy in an endearing way, Remain in Light doesn’t really need to have lyrics, and after 1980 the band displays about as much “artistic ambition” as Van Halen), and the diverse nature of these songs, from the gibberish electro-worldbeat opener “I Zimbra” to the weird, bouncy funk of “Life During Wartime” and the totally normal guitar pop of “Heaven,” is both new and admirable. On the other hand, most of the time it feels like the band is moving at half-speed, and the tasty instrumental interplay that was all over the first two albums has been drastically toned down. The rhythm section has lost its snap, and while some may be happy to find that the chicka-chicka pseudo-funk guitars have been excised from all but a few songs, I loved grooving to the dorky little sound these guys could whip up, miss it greatly, and am disappointed at how, when it does turn up, thanks to Eno, it sounds more like ugly scratching than anything else (see “Paper”).
I guess what I mean to say is that this is one of those dreaded “easier to admire than like” albums, and it’s probably gonna be more enjoyable to you if you’re one of those people who carefully listens for every musical nuance and intelligent lyrical turn, whereas if you just want something fun and stupid you should probably go for the debut (not that it’s actually stupid, ofcourse. If you want something truly and objectively “stupid,” go pick up True Stories). If you are one of those people, though, after you’re struck dumbfounded by that awesome “I Zimbra” thing that sounds like electronic tribal music and has a Robert Fripp guitar solo tacked onto the end that sounds like King Crimson’s entire Discipline album summarized in 30 seconds, you’ll probably be amazingly impressed by how David Byrne can write and then convincingly sing three consecutive creeped-out, decidedly paranoid tracks called, respectively, “Mind,” “Paper,” and “Cities” (on a related note, see the “Fear of…” thing now? One wonders whether, if he wrote this album today, David would’ve stuck a song on there called “Warmongering Neoconservative Dicks”). This album is really the height of David as a lyricist and singer, and dig how he makes lines like “I need something to…change your miiiiiiind!” and “Hold on…to that paper…” not only sound “weird,” but truly disturbing. Ofcourse, the tempo of both “Mind” and “Paper” either is much slower or just seems much slower than the first two albums, and while I like that fast descending plucked guitar thing in “Mind,” the scratchy chicka-chicka riffs that predominate certain sections of “Paper” are just annoying. My real problem is the lack of snappiness and tempo, though (“energy” is not an issue; David is in top form the whole time and often carries the album). I love “Air” (Yes, a song about air), and I love how it has these cool female “aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir!” backing vocals and the ending of the song is just about the best moment on the record (with the piano overdubs and crap), but, I mean, it just takes too long to get going. Ditto “Memories Can’t Wait,” which is a flat-out ugly minor-key dirge for two minutes and twenty seconds before suddenly morphing into one of the most beautiful things the band ever wrote right at the end. Dude, you have this awesome guitar line, chord sequence, and melody going for you; why bury it at the end of an ugly song that sounds like shit? That’s like taking “Heaven” (which rules, by the way), condensing it down to one minute, and tacking it on as a coda to “Electric Guitar” (which doesn’t rule, by the way).
I think the reason I like “Cities” the best is that it’s the only song here that successfully combines the speed and snap of the best songs from the first two albums with the freaked-out, paranoid rants that make this album so thematically neat. The way David yells “Do I smell? I SMELL HOME COOKING!” is just one of the coolest lines on the album to me, and even though the song is basically a sped-up vamp with like two things (the hyperspeed chicka-guitar riff and the simple keyboard line) repeated over and over again, this time the frigged-up atmosphere works, the guitar solo that sounds like a car warming up is fantastic, and Byrne’s paranoid yelpings just totally make the song. I think I like when the Talking Heads go faster because David’s spastic, nervous persona works better as the music speeds up and gets more spastic itself. Perhaps that’s why I find “Animals” wildly overrated (it’s more neat than good, and Byrne’s vocals are so omnipresent in the song I lose track of whatever musical backing there is in there), “Electric Guitar” tedious and annoying, and “Drugs” flat-out horrible. It’s not even a song. It’s just a bunch of goddamn noises. Atmosphere can only go so far, guys.
As seems to be typical with Talking Heads albums, the hit (in this case “Life During Wartime”) sounds nothing like the rest of the record, and while from a pure musical standpoint I can’t help but feel the song’s a tad bit overrated, it’s fun, catchy, and funky, and I find it brilliant how the incredibly depressing lyrics (“Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons, packed up and ready to go. Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway, a place where nobody knows) are contrasted so cleverly by both the happy, peppy music (there are even Happy Funk Bongos!) and David’s happy, peppy vocals. Here he is making songs called “Air” and “Paper” sound frightening, and now he comes along with a song about living in a war zone and makes it sound like goofy fun. A dance-party disco-funk song with the chorus “This ain’t no party! This ain’t no disco!” What a cool band.
As you may have been able to surmise from my poorly-organized ramblings, this album is a mixed bag. Thematically and lyrically, it’s definitely the most interesting Talking Heads album, but from a pure “musical goodies ‘n’ fun” standpoint, it clearly lags behind the three albums surrounding it in the first part of the band’s career. A fair chunk of it still rules (“I Zimbra,” “Cities,” “Life During Wartime,” “Air,” “Heaven,” the last minute of “Memories Can’t Wait,” probably “Mind” too), but other chunks of it are severely lacking, and the last two tracks (“Electric Guitar” and “Drugs”) are just boring and bad. However, it’s really unique, really interesting from a non-musical standpoint (a debate concerning the importance of which you could easily start, considering this is a “music review website”), and the good songs are as good as anything else the band did pre-Remain in Light (except maybe “Psycho Killer” and “The Big Country”), so an 8 seems about right. Be careful, though. Despite only coming out two years after ’77 and getting the same rating as that fine little pop record, I can’t imagine a Talking Heads album more different than it. Except maybe Remain in Light.
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Err, argh, this is indeed one
of those opinion splitting albums, and it's nice to see someone take the middle
ground, but personally I'd still have to rank this only second to RiL in the
Talking Heads pantheon.
Personally, I can not quite understand why (just because the Heads slowed
down, fattened up, and sort of "classic rock"-ified their sound)
people talk about how "gloomy" and "slow" and
"atmospheric" this album is. Obviously compared to the previous stuff
it sort of is, but it's not like they're suddenly Joy Division or something.
I think, though, that this change gave them a chance to focus on the
songwriting a little more; they occasionally forgot about hooks on the last
album; here almost every song has a strong one. Also, the lyrics are extremely
interesting (and often very funny), which is another big plus.
The highlights are "I Zimbra", the extremely hypnotic
"Mind", "Heaven" (especially great/confusing lyrics on
that one), "Cities", and the big, catchy, has nothing to do with the
rest of the album single "Life During Wartime", which is a pretty
great attempt at Prince style electro-funk.
While the last two songs are certainly pretty weak, I don't agree with
most about them being outright bad. I'm especially confused about you calling
"Drugs" "a bunch of goddamn noises"; seems sort of harsh
for a song that has both vocals and an actual structure (even if it's not that
apparent).
9/10 for the album.
Remain In Light (1980)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “The Great
Curve”
OK, so let’s talk about Remain in Light. It’s almost 2am (and that’s 2am Pacific Time, people, which means my dad is probably getting up to go to work right now), and I’m sitting here in my boxer shorts eating a freshly cracked-open box of delicious, delicious Cheez-Its (*receives lifetime supply of Cheez-Its from Sunshine Biscuits, LLC, does imaginary high-5 with no one*), but I’ve had this CD in my car for like the last four days on repeat, I keep not having time to review the damn thing, and if I don’t write a review tonight, goddammit, “Crosseyed and Painless” will simply never leave my head, and while I love “Crosseyed and Painless” and think it rules mucho ass, people tend to look at you funny if you’re frantically hitting your leg 1,000 times a minute (in an ultimately futile attempt to simultaneously recreate every percussion overdub with your two hands and left thigh) and humming “I’m stiiiiiiiiill waiting!” for no reason. Almost as much as if you have “The Great Curve” stuck in there and people catch you trying to hum all the vocal parts at once. Not that I’d know anything about that, ofcourse.
So yes, as you might have guessed from the fact that I’ve mentioned this album in every review on this page thus far (And don’t you just love when I do that?), it’s fantastic. It’s also so incredibly original and unique that, despite the fact that it’s so universally loved and praised by musicians and critics alike, it’s influenced exactly zero albums made after it (that I’ve heard), as well as being so goddamn ahead of its time that, despite the fact that it was made twenty-five years ago, a lot of it still sounds like it was beamed down to us from Planet Zoltron 5 in the Nebulon Galaxy. I was driving to see Beerfest (don’t see it, it bloooooows, and this is from someone who thinks Super Troopers is one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 21st century) with the Mythical Al recently while playing this album for him in my car, and as it was his first time hearing it and the damn thing starts off with “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” “Crosseyed and Painless,” and “The Great Curve,” he had absolutely no idea what to make of this insane music coming out of my car’s speakers, to the point where I don’t think he said a thing to me until the familiar-to-all single “Once in a Lifetime” and human-speed “Houses in Motion” finally drew him out of his shock. It was in the course of our debating why this album was so fucking weird (and, I added, AWESOME!!!) that I finally realized the obvious reason that no one has even attempted to recreate it in the quarter-century since: How many albums out there feature the combined talents and creative input of the Talking Heads, Brian Eno, King Crimson, and Parliament? Seriously, how many? People tend to just mention all the extra people that worked on this album without fully delving into the fact that, for the love of god, you have an immensely talented yet extremely odd producer like Brian Eno at the top of his game producing a band of art-school geeks led by a legally insane David Byrne, backed by the future guitarist of King Crimson and like ten guys that used to play with George Clinton. How often does that much high-quality, disparate talent ever come together?
So yes, the music on here, especially on the near-godlike side 1, is about as far from the fun, slightly screwy pop music the band was playing just three years ago as you can get. Many attempts have been made to describe exactly what genre it falls into (usually combining the words/prefixes “funk,” “worldbeat,” “progressive,” “electro-,” “afro-,” and “dude, that’s badass!”), but considering it sounds nothing like anything that came before it and no one’s tried to duplicate it since, let’s just call the genre “Remain in Light” and leave it at that. The first three songs are all masterpieces and all impossible to describe in one sentence. “I Zimbra” from Fear of Music would be the reference point, I suppose, but these things are about ten times as complicated and interesting, plus they’re actually danceable. Sure, you’re not gonna hear “Crosseyed and Painless” in a club any time soon, but listen to all those percussion parts and try to resist grooving to this hyper-speed, hyper-complex, insano-dance-music this psychotic band has created for you. It’s nuts, and I like how they put the most “out-there” song, “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” first, almost to weed out Those Who Cannot Handle It (which, I mean, is a lot of people. This is some freaky, whacked-out shit). The drums are doing a rather straightforward pseudo-disco groove back there somewhere, but the bass is doing some sort of slap rhythm in a different time signature altogether, and guitar lines and squiggles, synth lines, and computerized percussion fade in and out almost at random playing their own completely separate rhythms, and somehow everyone involved was able to make this mess fit together perfectly. It’s flabbergasting, so much so that it’s almost a relief when it’s over. “Crosseyed and Painless” and “The Great Curve” follow it, and while they’re certainly less disjointed than the opener, to describe them as anything resembling “normal” would still be asinine. Essentially, both tunes are just really, really speedy grooves with about ten extra percussion layers, super synth lines, and wonderfully creative Adrian Belew guitar noises on top, and I’ll stop there because I could probably spend an entire review on each of them individually. The vocals, though, are what make all three of these tunes to me. They aren’t so much sung as chanted by massive polyphonic overdubs, and the complexity increases with each tune to the point where you could probably write a thesis on the vocal harmonies in “The Great Curve” (an absolute tour-de-force and my favorite Heads song of all time) alone. There’s always a great solo David moment too, like his weird “facts rap” in “Crosseyed and Painless” and that line about “the world moves on a woman’s HIPS!” in “The Great Curve,” but the massed vocal layering is really where it’s at. It’s brilliant. If “The Great Curve” never ended, I don’t think I’d even mind. “So SAAAAAAY SO! So SAAAAAAAY SO!” What does it all even mean? Who knows, and who cares? It sounds awesome.
OK, so I’ve spent an entire review’s worth of space basically discussing three songs. It’s those three songs, though, that make the record so massively brilliant and unique, because side 1 finishes up with a radio single and side 2 is a bunch of slow, moody stuff that sounds nothing like tracks 1-3. Thankfully, a lot of it’s still fantastic. “Once in a Lifetime” (you know, “This is not my beautiful house!” “This is not my beautiful wife!”) is undoubtedly the best radio single-type song Byrne ever wrote, and serves as a nice “Hey! What a cool song!” transition between the manic side 1 and the draggy side 2, although I will say “Houses in Motion,” despite being relatively gloomy in its atmosphere, actually starts the second half by keeping the tempo at a nice pace and therefore lets the album gradually slide toward goth mopeyness instead of just thrusting it at us right away. I actually love this song, nearly as much as anything on side 1, and my feelings about its follow-up “Seen and Not Seen” are very positive as well (love the spoken word vocals in both songs). However, at this point, the album takes an abrupt left turn toward new-age atmospheric non-music shitsville. “Listening Wind” is at least semi-listenable, but “The Overload” is so horrendous I don’t think I’ve actually sat through its six excruciating minutes once after the first time I listened to it. I usually get through like three and then have to give up. It’s NOT MUSIC! It’s some synths making some ugly sounds over a morbidly slow drum beat and David Byrne’s ugly, off-key chanting. And I know I’ve already used the word “chanting” to describe the vocals on this album and did so in a rather flattering manner, but it’s really quite simple: “The Great Curve” had massive, brilliantly conceived and executed polyphonic chants that fit together like pieces of some sort of futuristic puzzle. “The Overload” has David Byrne making ugly crap sounds with his voice. See the difference?
Three-quarters of this album is a 10. It’s actually not even a debate, so strong and utterly unique are the first six tracks on this album. However, I give “Listening Wind” a 4 and “The Overload” a 1, which leaves me no choice but to move it the record as a whole down to a 9 on my all-important rating scale of superfluousness. Still, I’m not kidding when I say side 1 of this thing is one of the best album sides I’ve heard in my life, and anyone with even a passing interest in music has to hear it once in their lives. It’s so groundbreaking that it’s been twenty-six years and no one’s figured out how to properly imitate it yet, and that, dude, is bad-ass.
The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads (2004 Reissue) (2004)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Psycho
Killer (1977 concert)”
Fantastic and gargantuan live album originally released in 1982, but unavailable on CD until two years ago with Rhino’s mega-expando-re-release that saw the original, 17-track double LP fleshed out to a 33-track, 160-minute monster that you should all go out and spend the requisite $30 on before even reading this review. Now, if only because so few bands ever saw fit to play a set that broke 2.5 consecutive hours in length, this is obviously not a “complete concert experience.” Au contraire, it’s a “live compilation,” or in this case a “live career retrospective,” up to and including the Remain in Light tour which saw the original foursome augmented by a bunch of extra percussionists, a host of backup singers, 75% of the musicians who have ever played on a Parliament and/or Funkadelic album, and Adrian Belew. The original double-LP contained one side apiece from 1977, 1979, 1980, and 1981 (the last two both being from the Remain in Light tour), and I’m pretty sure the 5,000 bonus tracks were dispersed evenly among those four periods in time as well, which means More Songs-lovers like me are obviously up shit creek, but considering the Talking Heads were an absolutely superlative live band, I guess it’s no big deal.
I’m not gonna slap the 10 tag on it like so many others have due to a fair amount of the second disc’s being pretty redundant with the relevant studio versions, but I can safely say that, even though this record is thirty-three tracks and one-hundred and sixty minutes long, there is not a single performance I dislike. They break out a few songs from Fear of Music I could do without, sure, like how they see fit to include two versions of “Drugs.” The version from disc 1 sounds as much like the album version as “Psycho Killer,” however, and the one from later on, while more faithful to the atmospheric crap version found on Fear of David’s Ego, does employ organic drums and also figures that “hey, maybe it’d be a good idea to have a pulse,” and thus is perfectly listenable. Let me stress this again, though: THIRTY-THREE GODDAMN TRACKS AND NOT A SINGLE MISFIRE AMONG THEM. Are you kidding me? I’d say that’s a worthwhile purchase. Not that I actually purchased it, ofcourse.
Special Labor Day Prize-Pak (Ooooooo! A coupon to Jack in the Box! I always to die suddenly after eating a horrible burger!) to you if you guessed the best stuff comes from 1977, though. Isn’t that always the case? The energy, snap, and precision with which the band plays the first seven tracks on this album (on which it sounds like there are about five people there listening to them in their basement or something, and trust me when I say it sounds like you’re about two feet away from the kick drum yourself) are simply astounding. The rhythm section is so tight! The guitar interplay between David and Jerry is so fucking fantastic! These performances make their studio counterparts on ’77 sound positively muted, and the non-album track “A Clean Break (Let’s Work)” sounds better than most of the stuff that actually made the cut. Just outstanding, and while the rest of disc 1 drops slightly from “godlike” to “really, really fucking great,” it’s nice to hear such wonderful tracks as “The Big Country,” “The Girls Want to Be With the Girls,” and “Found a Job” played in a live setting. More Songs rules, man. Don’t you ever forget it. And the other non-album track, “Love – Building on Fire,” is again as good or better than everything else! Even the first three-quarters of “Memories Can’t Wait” doesn’t suck too much! Cool!
Disc 2 is where the tight foursome of the seventies gives way to the bloated monster of an ensemble that made up the Remain in Light tour, so those looking for the snap displayed on “New Feeling” way back when are obviously gonna be disappointed, but, I mean, is the fact that Adrian Belew and Bunny Worrell were suddenly on stage with them gonna make the band suddenly blow? Hell no! This is great stuff! Of the Remain in Light material, “Born Under Punches” admittedly suffers a bit in comparison to its downright ridiculous studio counterpart, but the army of extra musicians makes the rest of the material stack up quite nicely, thank you very much. And look! They play the first five tracks from Remain in Light and leave off the rest! Nice! Fuck “The Overload!” That song sucks! And ofcourse you’ve got your “Psycho Killer” and your “Take Me to the River” and your “Life During Wartime,” as well as your welcome curveballs like “Warning Sign” (SWEET!) and “Cities” (no so much a curveball considering half of Fear of Music is probably played on this disc at some point, but still SWEET!) I also want to again state how much “Crosseyed and Painless” and “The Great Curve” continue to blow my mind, and the fact that they’re both so faithfully and accurately reproduced here is beyond impressive. What a great band.
So yeah, this is a not half-bad live album. Stop Making Sense may be the mega-commercial blowout movie tie-in live album that everyone and their mother bought twice, but if you want to get an idea of just how good the Heads were from just one record, this is the one to get. Considering the sheer amount of material on here, there probably aren’t too many top-notch Heads songs not on this album, plus it’s got a really clever, self-referential pun for a title, which is always nice. Simply put, everything good about the Talking Heads is on this album. And as you can tell, there’s a lot of it.
Speaking In Tongues (1983)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Burning
Down The House”
Between 1977 and 1980, the
Talking Heads released four increasingly complex and ambitious records, moving
from simple, skewed guitar pop to
electro-afro-prog-worldbeat-polyrhythmic-funk-insano-music in three short years
while touring incessantly, and topped it all off by hiring about 500 extra
percussionists, backup singers, and Parliament funk veterans (and don’t forget
Adrian Belew!) for the incredibly draining Remain
in Light blowout tour. Christ, I get
exhausted just typing that. Anyway, as the band was all understandably
sick of each other, they took some time off.
David went off and made an album with Brian Eno with the word “bush” in
its title, about which I choose not
to make a dirty joke but will employ a
political pun (Hmmm…let’s call it My Life
in the (GEORGE W.) BUSH (IS A FUCKING
Even though this was by far the best-selling Heads studio album and on the surface it’s still real nice and fun and dancey and all, I must confess that when I first listened to it I didn’t like it at all, the main reason being that it was too damn sparse. From ’77 through to Remain in Light, the band excelled at making their music more and more layered and thick, to the point where I’ve listened to Remain in Light something like twenty times now and I still find a new percussion overdub or guitar line nearly every time I listen. I love albums like that! Alas, this is not one. Instead, this album is very eighties-sounding computerized white-person funk music, and the main musical goodies are contained in a bunch of neat, off-kilter synth lines and the fact that it still grooves pretty good (though now at a normal, human pace, which may ofcourse be the reason it sold so many damn copies). The last time a Talking Heads album had “open space” was way back on the debut, but that was a) understandable because it’s not like the band had the recording budget to toss anything more than the basic guitar-bass-drums setup into their stew and b) totally fine because I enjoyed listening to the four main instruments interact so much. The fact is, though, that the number of interesting guitar lines on this album is something around two (I’ll grant “Swamp” and “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody),” though the latter is so buried behind the synth line you can barely hear it), and the whole thing is basically a bunch of computerized dance beats and synth lines, with a whole fuckload of “open space” in the mix. And while the lyrics are still in the traditional Talking Heads vein of weird, nonsensical paranoia (and that’s all well and good), the lack of musical pyrotechnics on this record, especially when compared with the album that came before it (an admittedly unfair comparison), is simply disappointing.
I did say it was pretty good, though, didn’t I? Yeah. The vast majority of it sounds exactly like the humongo-smash single “Burning Down the House,” so if you like that one you’re in good shape. Ofcourse, it goes without saying that “Burning Down the House” is the class of the album, but did you expect anything less? Two things make “Burning Down the House” the best song here: first is the massive “BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE!!!!” chorus, which is one of the handful of times the vocals actually stand up to those on previous Talking Heads records, and second is the synth lines, which are nicely funky, a bit spacey, and absolutely fantastic. The extra percussion overdubs are nice, too, since it’s not like you see many of them elsewhere on the album. The following “Making Flippy Floppy” and “Girlfriend is Better” are almost as good and both have their moments (lots of weird, goofy, fun, scraggly synth lines!), but they might as well be the same song as far as I’m concerned, and it’s at this moment that I’m reminded of the Talking Heads’ habit of making 90% of an album sound identical to itself and how, while Fear of Music and especially Remain in Light avoided this flaw, Speaking in Tongues most definitely does not. “I Get Wild/Wild Gravity” is a little slower than the rest, “Swamp” has that bad-ass “Hiiii, a-hiiiiii hiiiiii hiiiiii hiiiiii hiiiiiiiiii!” vocal thing that I love, and “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” is actually a ballad with nice, tasteful “Let My Love Open the Door”-sounding synths, but the three songs I haven’t mentioned are just less exciting re-treads of the album’s first three songs (although “Slippery People” has a gospel backup chorus in it, which is notable because I hate that). Plus I don’t even like “I Get Wild/Wild Gravity” that much. I just mentioned it because it was different. And it’s not even really that different. This is an outstanding story, I know.
So Speaking in Tongues, despite seeing the band finally hit their long-deserved commercial jackpot, marks the point at which the Talking Heads stopped being artistically relevant, and anyone waiting for Remain in Light II was gonna be sorely disappointed by the rest of this band’s career. The intelligence, cleverness, and “off”-ness is still there, though, albeit disguised in doofy, goofball, computerized dance-funk music, and compared to a lot of stuff from 1983 it still sounds as complex as Gentle Giant, so it’s not like we’re in danger of falling off the wagon just yet.
Stop Making Sense (Special Edition) (1999)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Crosseyed
And Painless”
So Speaking in Tongues, especially the video for “Burning Down the House”
with the little kid climbing on David’s back at the end, was such a big hit
that the band went ahead and hired Jonathan Demme to make a concert film, which
is supposed to be awesome (I haven’t seen it) and was also a big hit, this time because of the part of the show where
David put on that hilarious giant floppy suit thing, but also because the
Heads, as mentioned before, were more than a half-decent live band. The original
soundtrack only had nine songs on it (BOO!!!), but when the movie was re-released
in 1999 (which I totally missed, by the way, not that I was Talking Heads fan
in high school and therefore would have gone to see it or anything), the
soundtrack was given the expanded re-issue treatment with the result that this
“Special Edition” contains all sixteen songs that featured in the movie in
lovely new re-mastered sound! Hee! And while ofcourse I have no idea how the
order of the tracks corresponds to that in the movie (which I really should see), it sure seems from
listening to this that they line up pretty good. “Psycho Killer” is David alone on an acoustic
guitar with a pre-recorded electronic drum loop, the following “Heaven” adds
only bass to David’s acoustic guitar (maybe Tina went on stage then?), then
“Thank You For Sending Me an Angel” (FANTASTIC
song selection there, by the way) adds just drums to the acoustic and bass
(followed by Chris Frantz?), “Found a Job” features dueling chicka-chicka
electric guitars in addition to the bass and drums (followed by Jerry
Harrison?), and only after this point
does the band delve into the Speaking in
Tongues material and add keyboards and backup singers and all that fun
giggity-giggity-giggity. For those of
you who’ve seen the movie, please let me know if I’m talking out of my ass
here. If I’m not, though, that’s a
pretty cool way to open a show, don’t you think?
Anyway, yes, this album’s not
as good as The Name of this Band is Brian
Eno’s Plaything. Ofcourse it isn’t, and there are two
pretty clear reasons why. First, even
though the band’s commercial peak is right now, they hit their creative peak a
few years back, so it goes without saying they’re just a weaker live band
now. Hell, they were at their live best
way back in 1977, remember? Plus now they’ve got all this electronic,
synth-laden material they have to play, so that super-tasty instrumental
interplay is just about totally gone except for “Found a Job” (which isn’t as
impressive as it was on Name of) and
the totally out-of-place, flabbergastingly
powerful performance of “Crosseyed and Painless” at the end. Second, ofcourse, is the material. They play two-thirds of Speaking in Tongues (thankfully including all the best songs,
though, again showing their indefatigable musical taste when it comes to
themselves), plus a song each from David’s solo album and the Tom Tom Club (the
latter of which is almost powerfully idiotic).
That’s half the album right there!
And it leaves just eight total
slots from which to draw songs from the first four albums, and you know they’re including “Psycho Killer,”
“Take Me to the River,” “Life During Wartime” and “Once in a Lifetime.” That leaves four “wild card” tracks, and
while the choices they made (“Heaven,” “Thank You For Sending Me and Angel,”
“Found a Job,” “Crosseyed and Painless”) were pretty damn good, I want “The
Great Curve,” goddammit! I want “Warning
Sign!” Fuck “Slippery People.” What, you say I’m being an idiot for
complaining about so many Speaking in
Tongues songs on a gigantic stadium tour supporting Speaking in Tongues? Well,
no shit! Douche!
The Speaking in Tongues songs are almost uniformly superior to their studio versions, though, so maybe I shouldn’t complain. This is actually a really, really good record here, and had I not reviewed the massive Name of a few days ago, I’d be going on and on about how great a live album this is and how, even though they’re multimedia superstars now and they really don’t have to have boatloads of energy when they perform anymore, they still do, and that’s cool. The Speaking in Tongues material sounds so much fuller and more fleshed-out here than it did on the album. I actually like “Slippery People” now, for instance, which is funny because I can’t recall a single thing about how the studio version sounds. The one song I think suffers a little is “Once in a Lifetime,” because the huge stadium sound and gospel backup singers make it lose a little bit of its idiosyncrasy to me, but it’s still a good performance, you know? It’s “Once in a Lifetime!” It’s one of the greatest songs the band ever did! It’s hard to fuck that song up, booming eighties drum sounds and female backup singers or not. And as I mentioned before, the closing “Crosseyed and Painless” is so good it sounds like it should be on a different live album. I like how the band starts off by playing a minute of meandering porn music before tearing into the song, too, just to build the dynamics. Like “what the fuck are they doing, what is this shit they’re pla-OH, DUDE! IT’S ‘CROSSEYED AND PAINLESS!!!!’ DUDE!” At least that’s how I would’ve reacted. Most of the crowd doesn’t seem to react all that strongly at the beginning of too many songs. Except for “Burning Down the House,” ofcourse. Two notes into the quiet acoustic intro and they’re already going nuts. Outstanding.
Anyway, this is a really good, great-sounding live album that presents all that material from Speaking in Tongues I was slightly lukewarm about in the best possible light while giving us faithful, expertly-played renditions of all the band’s other hits (well, all four of them). Tons of energy and lots of good playing, if not as impressively tight as the band used to be, if only because most of what they’re playing is on synths now. There would be very little to complain about were it not for the existence of The Name of This Band is Talking Heads and its proof that, as good as this live album is, the band used to be measurably better. I still like it fine, though, and it’s definitely my favorite listening experience from the second half of the band’s career. All the best Speaking in Tongues material is here, usually better than the album versions, plus you’ve got what might be the definitive recorded performance of “Crosseyed and Painless” tacked on at the end (I’m not kidding; it’s that good). You know what? I should probably go see the movie now.
Little Creatures (1985)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “And She
Was”
After jettisoning their artistic ambitions and dense, complex arrangements for Speaking in Tongues (and subsequently cashing in big-time), for their next studio album the Heads decided to jettison their mad-phat white-boy electro-funk beats and nonsensical lyrics as well, and you know what that leaves? Yup, a completely normal adult pop album! Just in terms of its instrumentation, production, lyrics, and genre, this record could have been made by countless other bands, and while that’s unfortunately the first time you can rightfully say that about a Talking Heads album, notice I haven’t yet employed the term “songwriting,” and that is the album’s saving grace. It may be a totally square adult pop album with normal-sounding guitars and mild, inoffensive keyboards and regular 4/4 acoustic drums (which, considering this album was made in 1985, is actually a compliment in itself if you think about it), but it’s also got a bunch of really good, catchy pop songs on it, and even though it undoubtedly continues the decline in the Talking Heads’ artistic relevance begun with Speaking in Tongues, I like it just fine.
The two
hits here were the opening “And She Was” and the closing “Road to Nowhere,” and
I’m not ashamed to admit both of them probably crack my top 10 Heads tracks of
all time. I know it’s been a while since
the Heads have gotten by on songwriting alone (since way back on ’77, really), but, despite the full,
professional, and tasteful production (which obviously doesn’t hurt), that’s
exactly what they do here. “And She Was”
is just an outstanding commercial pop song from start to finish. Lovely guitar sounds, nice simple piano riff,
and charming cowbell usage, plus David doesn’t even sound like a freak-boy
anymore! He sounds normal, for the love of god, or at least as normal as David Byrne
can sound. Yeah, it doesn’t really sound
like a Talking Heads song as we’ve come to expect over the years, but the
melody is crisp and sharp and fantastically
catchy. I especially love the “Hey, hey,
hey, hey, hey!” part in there. So damn hummable. “And She Was” is probably the most happily,
hummably, enjoyably catchy song the Heads ever wrote, and while “Road to
Nowhere” can’t quite match it for pure melody, it comes damn close while also managing quite effectively to be relatively
“big” and “epic”-sounding, at least in the context of this album (“The Great
Curve” makes it look like one of the Zombies’ more “lightweight” tracks).
The snare shuffle groove Chris Frantz works up (a-la “Thank You For
Sending Me an Angel,” but slowed-down enough to be perfect for a smash-hit
popular radio song) is outstanding, the organ is a perfect addition, and the
giant chorus of backup singers really
works.
It’d be nice if the middle of
the album measured up to those two tracks, but unfortunately it doesn’t really
come all that close. Count me a big fan,
though, of the country-tinged “Creatures of Love” (featuring the provocative
line “I’ve seen sex and I think it’s OK!”) and the adorable piano pop number
“Stay up Late,” which documents David’s desire to keep his newborn baby up to
the wee hours of the night so he can play with him because awwwwwwwww he’s so cuuuuuute!!!! “See him drink from a bottle, see him drink
from a plate! Cute, cute as a
button! Don’t you wanna make him stay up
late?” Yeah, it’s dopey (by the way, how
odd does it feel to hear the word “dopey” aptly describing a Talking Heads song? Especially a good one?), but it’s charming, and it actually fits the soft, cute,
non-threatening feel of the album to a tee.
Christ, throw some minor chords and couple ominous synth chords on “Give
Me Back My Name” and suddenly it sounds like armageddon’s upon us compared to
the rest of this stuff. Ditto the
extended outro to “Television Man” with the eighties-sounding slap-bass and
sax. They’re decent songs, though. Not great, but decent. That’s a fantastic description, I know.
I guess the album really boils down to two fantastic songs (“And She Was” and “Road to Nowhere”), two really good songs (“Creatures of Love” and “Stay up Late”) and a bunch of other stuff. I suppose I like “Perfect World” and its “heavenly” synth/chorus backing a good bit, and maybe “Walk it Down” is a little weaker than the rest, but except for the four best tunes, the best way to describe the rest of album is “pleasant.” Nice melodies, pretty arrangements…pretty solid stuff, but nothing too memorable. The overall vibe is so positive and the bookends are so ridiculously strong that I have to break out the 8, though. It’s such a nice album, and the melodies, especially on the best songs, are generally very strong. The record’s simplicity is obviously gonna be a shock to someone only familiar with, say, Remain in Light, but, simple or not, this album has some damn good pop songs, and who doesn’t like a good pop song?
True Stories (1986)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Wild Wild
Life”
An almost pathologically stupid pop-rock
album that finds the Talking Heads officially becoming a commercial and
artistic afterthought, True Stories
is, shockingly, actually not that bad, or at least enjoyable in a dopey, “this
is actually retarded but since it makes my toes tap and I have no musical
taste, I kind of enjoy it” kind of way.
It’s also possibly the most confusing album to explain in concept I’ve
yet to review. See, in 1986 David
wrote/directed/produced/edited/catered a feature film called, funnily enough, True Stories, which focused on the lives
of a bunch of random, eccentric yet “normal” people in the fictional town of
As I said before, this record is so dumb it’s ridiculous, but the Talking Heads’s songwriting, for the most part, is still hovering at a decent enough level that it doesn’t come out all that horrendously. However, you should be warned that, while Little Creatures, despite its mid-eighties release date, was wonderfully and tastefully produced and sounds like it could have come from any era, True Stories is unfortunately full of the kind unnecessarily loud, reverbed drums and crap guitar tones that instantly date so many mid-eighties rock albums. So that’s not good. And despite my claims that the album is overall not too awful, a decent number of its compositions really are awful, and while an awful Talking Heads song used to mean a horrendous new-age synth wash Eno-inspired teeth-pulling exercise in putting me to sleep (like “Drugs” or “The Overload”), now it just means a crappy rock song that sucks, like the hideous “Puzzlin’ Evidence,” which consists of five and a half minutes of one doofy keyboard line and a bunch of annoying women yelling “PUZZLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN’ EVIDENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” at the top of their lungs with no tunefulness whatsoever. However, it could also consist of a six-minute exercise in taking all the great worldbeat-influenced tracks the band did in 1979 and 1980 and shitting all over them (“Papa Legba”), constructing an overwrought, generic, limp-dicked ballad (“City of Dreams”), or creating a reggae song for toddlers with severe learning disabilities (“Hey Now”), so, really, there are tons of possibilities here.
OK, so
while all the album is “stupid,”
about half of it is “stupidly enjoyable.”
The opening rocker “Love For Sale,” for instance, is moronic.
Does it even have any lyrics beyond the “LOVE FOR SAAAAALE!”
chorus? It might as well not, in any
case, but it has some neat guitar parts, it rocks pretty good and books along nicely, and David’s vocals are back to
being paranoid-schizophrenic, so it ends up a pretty nice time in spite of its
overwhelming idiocy. “Wild Wild Life”
was the single, and it’s nothing but a fun, light, cute pop song. It wouldn’t sound all that out-of-place on Little Creatures, really, except that it
too has a grand total of about one lyric.
I’m not ashamed to admit I enjoy it a good bit, and I also get a kick
out of the doofy reggae song “Radio Head” (yes, there are two of them here). What can
I say? The melody is fun, and the
accordion in background is a hoot! I
find it hard to believe that Radiohead
named themselves after this retarded song, though, and choose to believe they
worship Remain in Light like I do but
thought “Crosseyed and Painless” was a dumb band name (but is it just me or
would “The Great Curve” be an awesome
band name?). “Dream Operator,” then, is
a surprisingly tasteful little pop tune with some very nice, light piano work
(though David’s vocals are horridly out-of-tune), and “People Like Us” is,
honest to god, a total country-pop tune (and I know I said “Creatures of Love”
was “country-tinged” before, but there’s a difference between “tinged” and
making a slide guitar a song’s entire musical basis) that, despite being
idiotic in a lyrical sense (like this entire record, really), is at least
enjoyable in an inoffensive, silly way.
Between the “aw shucks we’re all just regular folks” vibe of the song,
the comical stupidity of the album as a whole, and the whole concept of the True Stories movie, though (A small town
in
Anyway, this album is dumb and
you should not get it. Sure, half of
it’s enjoyably dumb, but it’s really
not that enjoyable, and it’s not like
having half an album not suck ass makes it a worthwhile purchase. I also have an “Extended Mix” of “Wild Wild
Life” tacked onto the CD version I have, but it pretty much blows (yeah, I
bought this one, but not Remain in Light or Name of This Band. In my
defense, however, I used a gift card given to me as a Christmas present by a
student (so it’s not like I’m paying
for it), and it’s the only Heads album I couldn’t find anywhere either online
or in the Suffolk County library system (which means they actually had a copy
of Naked kicking around in Patchogue
or something…god, I miss the Suffolk County library system…)). You should really end your Talking Heads
experience at Little Creatures. Most of the public did anyway.
Naked (1988)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “(Nothing
But) Flowers”
The Talking Heads go out with a whimper by, for the first time in almost a decade, attempting to make “serious, artistic” music and ofcourse falling flat on their faces in the process. I suppose it would help if they had a clue as to how to make worthwhile, challenging music anymore or if their songwriting were even up to True Stories level at this point, but it’s not like either of these things are the case. Outstanding. So what we’re left with is over fifty minutes (we have officially hit the CD age!) of meandering, structure-deficient, melodically weak “stuff” with a bunch of bongo-laced polyrhythms slapped on top because “hey, isn’t that what we did on Remain in Light? Have a bunch of cool polyrhythms?” Well, yes, that is what you did on Remain in Light, but those polyrhythms consisted of more than a bunch of half-assed bongo jams layered on top of crappy songs. The songs on Remain in Light also had godlike, ultra-complex polyphonic harmonies, impossibly fast tempos, a future member of King Crimson on “awesome, weird guitar solos,” and half of Parliament backing you up. Oh, and Brian Eno producing. Not just a bunch of dudes playing fucking bongos.
Now, if you peruse this site regularly, you know that I generally enjoy well-placed bongo drums in numerous contexts, but on this album it seems Mr. Byrne is just using a goddamn bongo track (and, sometimes, a really awful-sounding horn chart!) as a substitute for actually making interesting music. The first two tracks here, “Blind” and “Mr. Jones,” should give you a decent idea of what you’re dealing with. I can’t even find a verse/chorus structure to these songs, and the only time David does anything interesting or “David-like” with his voice is when he gruffly yells the title of the song in “Blind” far, far too many times not to piss me off (or maybe that’s not him; I don’t even know). The sad thing is these songs aren’t even that horrible. Sure, they’re bad, but they’re strangely and almost annoyingly pleasant. Like muzak. With all the horns and everything, maybe they’re supposed to be some kind of funk music? I can’t tell! And when you can’t tell what genre a song is supposed to be (and it’s not inventing a new genre like Remain in Light did), you’re probably in trouble. But this kind of un-funky, hopelessly un-hip, pseudo-calypso music is where, like, half this album is at, really, and the pathetic thing is it’s actually better when it sticks to that. Take away the pleasantly generic bongo “polyrhythms” and you’re left with horrendous, “adult quasi-industrial” (this is what I’m calling this shit) claptrap like “Facts of Life” and “Bill,” which are both almost comically bad.
Thankfully, the record’s not all crap, or else the rating would certainly be lower than it is. I enjoy the semi-creepy, accordion-based “Mommy Daddy You and I” a little for some reason, and “Big Daddy” actually uses dynamics and builds to a decent climax by its finale. Not that I’d call these songs good or anything, at least in the way I’d call good “Totally Nude” and “(Nothing But) Flowers,” two melodic, jumpy tracks that, if not all-time Talking Heads classics, certainly qualify as “enjoyable.” They do the same “let’s layer some bongos over the top of a song with no real chorus in an attempt to make it sound like it has depth” thing that the rest of album does, but thankfully they’re actually doing this to quality compositions this time. “Totally Nude” is just happy and smiley and silly and makes me realize this album is probably a lot closer to Little Creatures in its cuteness than I’m willing to admit (since, you know, I like that album), and “(Nothing But) Flowers,” a charming tale of a city-dweller lamenting that all his favorite landmarks (Parking lots! Convenience stores!) have been replaced by green grass and flowers, is really a grand old time. While it’s true that neither of these songs have what one would call a “chorus,” the meandering Byrne vocals are actually melodic and nice-sounding in both, and they actually break out some honest-to-goodness guitar parts in both, which is nice to hear. Sure, these “guitar parts” consist of lowly-mixed, sunny chord sequences and aren’t the most interesting things in the world, but they go quite well with the happy vocals and those happy bongos that are all over everything on this album. They’re very light songs. Very nice. Hell, “(Nothing But) Flowers” was used in Clerks II in its entirety earlier this year and Guster covers it regularly at their live shows, so maybe you’ve heard it! But if you haven’t don’t worry about it.
So the Talking Heads make one last gasp at being “serious artists,” but end up sounding like bongo-drenched office muzak, and the only good songs are as silly and dippy as True Stories. I suppose I’d call that a failure. As you can probably guess, “that new album by those dorks who used to be good five years ago with the monkey on the cover” didn’t sell all that well, and they broke up a few years afterwards. Ho-hum. Now go buy Remain in Light.