Talking Heads
Remain In Light
»
|
NATN Recommended
Talking Heads
Remain In Light
Sire, 1980
RiYL: |
Over the years (and decades) Remain In Light has proven the Heads most sustaining, expansive, vibrant and joyous work. Better than More Songs; better even than 1980’s cause célèbre London Calling. One of that decade’s unquestioned masterworks.
The album opens with the on-edge imploration, “Take a look at these hands”—David Byrne’s thin white geek as fractured visionary from the bush of ghosts. A deracinated choir soon drifts in, acting as counterpoint and ballast. But just as the backwoods mystic’s exhortations seem to subside, he unleashes another round of feverish outbursts (“I’m not a burning building!”). The sinuous instrumental weave grounding “Born Under Punches” works a similar magic, building rhythm upon rhythm in a dense ebb and flow reminiscent of prime P-Funk.
This infectious, unrelenting groove snakes through the rest of the first “side” (in 1980, sides still mattered), both the ultimate distillation and apotheosis of the “disco disc” aesthetic. And over the top Byrne’s non sequiturs regularly signify more than they portend: “Lost my shape,” “Facts just twist the truth around” (a mantra for Bush’s second term) and of course, the eternal earth-mother revelation, “The world moves on a woman’s hips.”
The second side is altogether darker, moodier, more atmospheric, the one anomaly being the early-MTV staple “Once in a Lifetime.” But if that supreme dance-pop (i.e. new wave) confection is a musical misdirection, it remains thematically of a piece—water as baptism, as rebirth, as mystery of life. The cool, rippling surfaces of Remain In Light ’s remaining tracks are the true realization of the “water music” assayed on “fifth Head” Brian Eno’s Before and After Science.
And their lyrical content finds Byrne at his most prophetic…and well, visionary. The young terrorist of “Listening Wind” is pure of heart and clear of purpose; the facial phantasmagoria of “Seen and Not Seen” upends today’s nip/tuck downward spiral; and the grim darklands of “The Overload” evoke a terrible beauty too often missing from the radical Right’s end-times rhetoric. Crucially, the album’s modernist ghost stories are graced by a redemptive clarity and lightness; I’d swear “Houses in Motion” was inspired by a Buster Keaton two-reeler.
Though Remain In Light is readily acknowledged by critics as a highwater mark, Heads-heads aren’t always persuaded—perhaps because it barely registers as a Talking Heads album. With Byrne seized by fits of ecstasy and singing in tongues, Eno is left to oversee the aural gestalt, ensuring that the album’s intricate textures remain lucid and vibrant (i.e. in light).
At times, the other band members seem little more than key role players. Multi-instrumental threat Jerry Harrison is regularly upstaged by Adrian Belew’s otherworldly skronk, while Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth’s unwavering rhythmic pulse serves as de facto table-setting for Jose Rossy’s can’t-stop-won’t-stop percussion and avant-trumpeter Jon Hassell’s music of the spheres. But if their contributions aren’t easily ID’d, Franz, Harrison and Weymouth are nonetheless critical—just compare Byrne and Eno’s anthro-exotica collaboration from the following year. Where Remain In Light’s Afro-punk-funk fusion feels organic and forward-looking, My Life in the Gush of Boasts is unbearably artsy and arch.
Understandably, to save the marriage, an inspired partnership had to end. Soon after Remain In Light ’s release, Eno and the Heads parted ways. But though the uneasy union survived (even thrived) for eight more years, the resulting albums, despite their enduring pleasures, are the work of a different band—more easeful and accommodating, less preoccupied with reinvention, in a word, safer. The nervous, often intoxicating energy of their initial creative burst was forever passed—heard and not heard.
SCOTT MANZLER |