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| ARTIST: |
Talking Heads
(Google this artist) |
| ALBUM: |
The Name of This Band is TALKING HEADS |
| LABEL: |
Rhino |
| RELEASED: |
2004 (original release date 1982) |
| EXTRAS: |
bonus tracks |
"Stop Making Sense," the Talking Heads concert film and soundtrack, is so well known and well regarded it's easy to forget that an earlier live album, "The Name of This Band is TALKING HEADS," is actually superior as a pure listening experience. One of the reasons it's easy to forget is that it's been out of print since it was released as a 2-LP set in 1982.
Finally, 22 years later, "The Name of This Band is TALKING HEADS" is available on CD. And Rhino records, in typical fashion, has taken something that was great and made it even better by doubling the length and pleasure factor of the original album.
Talking Heads, like the Beatles, the Police, R.E.M. and Radiohead, were a true album band, where each record could be counted on to feature great songs and dramatic growth in equal measure. "The Name of this Band" charts the Heads' equally stunning evolution onstage, from 1977 when they were an four-piece band of jittery, angular art students, through the 1981 "Remain in Light" tour where they blossomed into a ten-piece multicultural art-funk mothership.
As disc one makes clear, singer/songwriter/guitarist David Byrne was a perfect New Wave rock star for the late 70s, when irony and post-modernism first took hold in popular culture, led by Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman. Byrne's lyrics offer insights by being ridiculously naïve. They sound like they're written by a person who believes everything he reads in advertising pamphlets, as in "Don't Worry About the Government:
My building has every convenience
It's going to make life easy for me
It's going to be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones
Another thing becomes obvious: the T -Heads don't get enough credit as musicians. The guitar work of Byrne and Jerry Harrison is percussive, distinctive and imaginative right from the start. And the husband & wife rhythm section of bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz keep everything bouncy and hard driving. Weymouth's trebly bass lines sometimes recall Revolver-era Paul McCartney.
The album does a nice job of charting the band's progression, touching down on tours in support of "More Songs About Buildings and Food" and "Fear of Music." Their run-through of "I'm Not In Love" is ferocious. "Heaven" is striking and dreamlike, while "Air" is playfully odd.
Things really get cooking on the second disc, which highlights their 1981 Afro-funkfest. Epics like "Crosseyed and Painless" and "The Great Curve" pull from so many global influences that it still astonishes over two decades later. Much credit here goes to the great sideman Adrian Belew, the only living guitarist capable of making his Stratocaster sound like a wet seagull stuck in a jet engine. (That's a compliment.) It's a long way from CBGB.
With 33 tracks of eccentric, beautiful music, "The Name of This Band is Talking Heads" is one of the best reissues to come out in a long time. Anyone who thinks Radiohead (who took their name from a Heads song) was the first band to mine this kind of visionary territory should pick up a copy today.
review by Steve Walsh
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©
Figgle 2001-2007