How does David Byrne do it? Thirty-five years after Talking Heads: '77, one of the most unique albums to come out of the entire punk movement, he is still releasing music which sounds like nothing else out there.
Love This Giant, his collaboration with songstress St. Vincent, is a disconcerting record, both familiar and bizarre, funky and offbeat, poppy and avante-garde. Some songs have enough of Byrne's trademark quirky rhythms and phrasing to give his fans a handle, and others have St. Vincent's smoother flow but, invariably, all of them turn on you and surprise very quickly. This is truly an album unlike any other I've heard, and it took me quite a while to absorb and appreciate it – and I'm a huge Byrne fan.
I would argue that Byrne reaches a level of creativity even beyond artists like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen – who all continue to produce great music – but usually within familiar formats; they rarely surprise anymore. Even master chameleon David Bowie eventually sounded like himself.
So how does Byrne do it? Love This Giant provides two answers.
The first is collaborate. This album is a true collaboration; Byrne and St. Vincent sent song snippets back and forth, slowly building them into complete songs. The whole album took two years to complete. Although, as I mentioned, certain parts sound like their individual, previous work, for the most part they manage to blend their styles into something fresh and new, into their own sound.
Byrne, of course, is no stranger to collaboration, from his early work to Brian Eno to his recent album Here Lies Love with Fatboy Slim. And, both with the Talking Heads and in his solo work, he has recruited lesser known musicians from Africa and Latin America to push his creativity, and force him to re-think structure on a fairly regular basis. His other trick is to constantly experiment with new musical forms. From his early experiments with African rhythms in Talking Heads through the Latin American forms on his first solo album, Rei Mondo, continuing through 2004's Grown Backwards, where he included operatic arias, Byrne has always expanded his musical palate.
Here, it is Byrne and St. Vincent's decision to use a brass band as the musical foundation. They were originally commissioned to write a piece to be performed in a bookstore, and decided the brass band would best fit its acoustic demands. Although this is not Byrne's first time working with brass, using the band as the primary instrumentation forces the music in unexpected directions. The brass band eliminates certain rock music expectations, such as pounding rhythms and guitar solos. Yet, at the same time, it is the disruption of our expectations which makes this such a strange record. To a certain degree, it is an electronica album, but instead of synthesizer bleats, we get splashes of brass.
Lyrically, we are on much more familiar ground here. Even though the CD cannot be divided clearly into sets of songs by one collaborator and the remainder by the other, Byrne's jaundiced view of human society is very common here; especially on songs such as "Dinner for Two," "I am an Ape," and "I Should Watch TV." St. Vincent's concerns are more interpersonal. Beyond that, there are times when they blend, moving from micro to macro examinations of our relationships.
In many ways this reminds me of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – Byrne's early collaboration with Eno – which not only lead to the Afro-centric sound of later Talking Heads, but basically invented sampling. While Love This Giant may not be as innovative as that CD, it is another truly collaborative recording which pushes pop music into new territory. I can only wonder where Byrne will go next.
Artist:
www.lovethisgiant.com/
www.facebook.com/LoveThisGiant
Album:
Love This Giant is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
