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Volume CXXXII, Number 18 |
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'80s suck! Talking Heads rock!
SEAN TURLEY
STAFF WRITER
You're crossing the street. You look left-nothing. You look right-nothing. You look right in front of you-BAM! You're dead. You've been killed...Dun dun DUN...by the eighties. The most horrendously hedonistic of decades. A juggernaut of faux cool that destroys EVERYTHING in its path.
It's coming for you. It's already here. For proof just review the tape of Shania Twain's performance at the Superbowl which included, but was not limited to: blatant lip synching, a keyboard guitar and-worst of all-a mohawked drummer.
Close the windows. Lock the doors. If you've already committed to the '80s renaissance please just sit in some deep hole somewhere. Don't you remember those years? Even at eight years of age near the end of the decade I felt permanently scarred by it. It was all neon, Wham!, gravity-defying Flock of Seagulls hair, and synthesizers.
These trends besieged popular music, ate its heart, and poisoned unsuspecting Gen X minds. It flourished for too long, creating a cocoon around originality from which the '90s would eventually spring.
Fortunately for the people who lived during that time and for us today, there was one single ray of daylight in this disgusting mess- one band that gave the eighties back its heart. And it only accomplished this feat because it was in fact from the '70s.
That band was the Talking Heads-the pinnacle of art-punk-rhythm-as-expression on vinyl. Their best album More Songs About Buildings and Food, of course, came two years before the big eight zero set in (further demonstrating the corrupting nature of that decade).
More Songs about Buildings and Food was the band's first collaboration with instigator/avant-garde screwball Brian Eno, who encouraged the band to let David Byrne's lyricism take a backseat to the band's rollicking rhythms. The best way to appreciate this evolution is to listen to "Psycho Killer" off of the mediocre debut 77 and then shake your bad self to any track off of More Songs.
Right from the get-go, the Talking Heads shoot for the ultimate geek party album and nail it perfectly. Through several inventively funky, abrupt and jittery keyboard, bass, and guitar riffs, the album can't help but make you move. Tina Weymouth's (by far the hottest of the '80s rock stars with those high socks) bass playing, the standout factor on More Songs, dominates throughout, keeping the funk fresh and the party swinging. The first two tracks "Thank for Sending me an Angel" and "With our Love" accelerate up to midtempo, immediately getting you right off your seat where you:
A) (if alone) start to dance chaotically across your room or,
B) (if with more than 4 people) begin to detachedly talk about art rock's ability to make you a regular jumpin' jelly bean.
The album's best trait is its eclecticism: each sound contains so many poetically frantic moments that you can sense it just might explode at any second. Take two of the last four tracks for example. "I'm not in Love" (the best of so many great songs on the album) is a fantastic stop-and-go rocker based on a single abrasive riff that keeps the song quite fierce. Then two songs later the Talking Heads do exactly what you wouldn't expect: they cover Al Green's "Take Me to the River" and turn it all geek-like into an artsy tour de force.
Both edgy and artsy, the album will simply rock your socks off while keeping all your music pretentiousness quite in tact. If just for this album's sake, let's all forget the '80s and go to the golden age-the year of the Talking Heads unrivaled explosion -in 1978.
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