“A Long Time Ago” more or less picks up where Naked left off, with an eerie melody over subtle percussion. But for the furious jangle that pins most of the track, “Angels” percolated with the classic vibe of “Once In A Lifetime”, particularly via the mostly spoken vocals. The distortion pedal stays on for “Crash”, which flirts with Mideastern rhythms and melodies, but gets derailed into a wildly dissonant bridge, and almost does again at the end before a gentle coda. That’s a nice segue to “A Self-Made Man”, which is a lovely track with unfortunately literal lyrics. The robotic “Back In The Box” stays radio-friendly until the closing scraping from guest guitarist Arto Lindsay, while “Sad Song” is anything but; rather, it’s a successful meld of Latin and rock.
“Nothing At All” again offers a spoken verse with a sung chorus, like a textbook David Byrne song. The convoluted riffing keeps the song interesting through the dreamy bridge, but again, the scraping lead guitar solo becomes tiresome. For a nice interlude, “My Love Is You” is a cute, pitch-challenged, and backhanded expression of affection, with a few unexpected couplets, complete with tuba. “Lilies Of The Valley” sports some disturbing imagery, but the vibraphone solo is fitting. He gets funky with “You & Eye”; turns out he’s responsible for both the clavinet and the guitar solos. “Strange Ritual” returns to the spooky place we started, but the lyrics follow the “in the future” template he’s been plying for years, only this time they’re “visions”. The tension builds to a dynamic close, leaving us with the more simple pleasures of “Buck Naked”.
While the music is as dark and stark as the packaging, David Byrne still manages to capture the ear. It’s worth re-discovery.
David Byrne David Byrne (1994)—3
I wouldn’t say the whole album is dark. His playful sense of humor is certainly obvious on songs such as “You and Eye”, the hilarious “Sad Song”, “Buck Naked” and “My Love is You”. Non sequiturs are all over the place, as usual.
ReplyDeleteI also like the low-key guitar sound, which allows the melodies and vocals to stand out more. The production is the most stripped down he had done since “True Stories”. It’s good that he didn’t entirely drop the ethnic percussion, like on "A Long Time Ago". I would imagine that these songs would have come across really live, but I don’t know if he toured the album. I think Talking Heads fans that were dissatisfied with the stuff David began doing after “True Stories” would really like this.