Talking Heads are a band that I never really got very into. Like everybody else, I was familiar enough with the singles but I never had any of the full records. Once everybody got MP3 players however, it seemed as if I was the only one. My friend Rick gave me every one their albums assuring me that they are all worth listening to several hundred times, and instead of realizing that I had six or seven great albums I felt more burdened with the pressure of listening to sixty some-odd songs a million times to catch up with everyone else. Naturally, I avoided listening to the records even though they are all still on my iPod waiting to be listened to, and until a day or two ago the only album I've listened to is "Stop Making Sense" which is a live album.
So when this randomly came on my iPod I figured that it's album time to give Talking Heads a shot. For anyone else with the same problem of tackling a behemoth as I have, I would say this is a good place to start. There's a certain style that Talking Heads have on Remain In Light where they eschew the normal cadential songwriting that rock and roll generally follows, with verses and choruses having different chord progressions. Talking Heads start out pretty minimally with only a few chords, and instead of moving forward they let the chords stew with more and more rhythms, instruments and melodies piling on top of it leaving it to David Byrne's narratives and vocal patterns to drive the song forward.
The thing about Remain in Light that makes it so interesting to me as a person in 2008 listening to it for the first time is how much the listener is involved with the songs. You can very easily let it all wash over you, but at the same time there are so many nuances in the layers and layers and layers of instruments that you could listen to single songs for hours and still discover new things. This record also doesn't sound dated at all, and that might have to do with the fact that LCD Soundsystem has already brought Talking Heads' style to a new set of fans, but it's also because instead of relying heavily on synthesizers (which is detrimental to most records in the 80's), this record is all about percussion and performance. When they do cave into strange keyboard sounds, like the ones in the solo in "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)", they play the parts and play with the sounds so creatively that it still sounds like it's from the future. And for a record that came out almost 30 years ago at this point, that's saying an awful lot.
1 comment:
The key to the Talking Heads is texture over hook. But once you listen to an album, you realize there were like fifty moments you'll never get out of your head, so I guess it's more than their hooks are subtle and the song is rarely built around any one moment. They get lumped into 80's New Wave, but they really were thinking on a different level than their "peers."
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