Little Creatures
And you can dance to them too, they said way back, and it was the truth. Talking Heads are one of the perfect marriages of modern rock'n'roll. They don't just sound of angles, perspectives and prisms of thought, they actually mean something! And dey got riddim too!! Ah yes, David Byrne is a fellow who knows what it is to be ridden by an angst, and to make it jumpy and funky and fun!
Dermot Stokes
And you can dance to them too, they said way back, and it was the truth. Talking Heads are one of the perfect marriages of modern rock'n'roll. They don't just sound of angles, perspectives and prisms of thought, they actually mean something! And dey got riddim too!! Ah yes, David Byrne is a fellow who knows what it is to be ridden by an angst, and to make it jumpy and funky and fun!
Their many phases have yielded some of the most memorable albums of the '70s and '80s, and what's more, they keep on winding up. New shapes appear before your eyes. Hence 'Remain in Light', and all those big funky sounds that followed, the African percussions and harmonies, the augmented sound...
Stop Making Sense in many ways marked the end of all that. It mapped out the course of their career from the moment David Byrne set down his rhythm machine on the stage to play 'Psycho Killer' solo, to the last pounding vibrating note. There it all was, wrapped up in one of the most riveting music films you'll ever see.
Little Creatures doesn't find Talking Heads to be much diminished in adventure, but they've returned to a sparser sound. Its a more ethnic album, believe it or not, and between its first and last tracks it touches most of Talking Heads' many past bases, (and cheerfully at that) as well as opening up a few more.
'Creatures Of Love', the third track on side one is - what'll you call it - Talking Heads' country music (1), with no less a man than Eric Weissberg on steel guitar, and Chris Frantz on rimshots. It's a real pretty little hymn of praise to sex and procreation. Hot Press music!
Much of the album is taken up with questioning the *reality* that we see around us, with the experience of waking or dreaming that changes a person's perspective on what they see, and with the sense you can get that, actually not everything is as you see it . .. and that even if it was... it's not actually going anywhere.
In some hands that could yield some pretty portentous and leaden results, but David Byrne's lyrics, and the music he and the band have built around them, give them a simple accessibility, like a Chinese conundrum, or like a nursery thyme concealing layers and layers of meaning.
It is this singability that makes this album such an attractive thing. There are hooks and teases all through it - the first track 'And She Was' compresses twenty years of pop, from 'La Bamba' (bass coda chord changes) through the late sixties acid period (subject matter) into the eighties (Talking Heads' chord changes, melodic structure and production values)...
That cohesion and sense of completeness is typical of the album - it manages to sound like all Talking Heads' albums and yet like a new one.
Check it out. And while you're at it, have a look at the unnerving fundamentalist Christian painting on the cover. No. 1 don't think the band are Making A Statement, I think the painting (of Talking Heads' music, *By Howard Kister. From God, In Visions Of Other Worlds Beyond The Right Of The Sun*), just appealed to them. But then, turn it over. Look at the clothes the band wear. Above all else look at David Byrne. Wah!
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