Talking Heads

Talking Heads found a way to open up the dense textures of the music they had developed with Brian Eno on their two previous studio albums for Speaking in Tongues, and were rewarded with their most popular album yet. Ten backup singers and musicians accompanied the original quartet, but somehow the sound was more spacious, and the music admitted aspects of gospel, notably in the call-and-response of "Slippery People," and John Lee Hooker-style blues on "Swamp." As usual, David Byrne determinedly sang and chanted impressionistic, nonlinear lyrics, sometimes by mix-and-matching clichés ("No visible means of support and you have not seen nothin' yet," he declared on "Burning Down the House," the Heads' first Top Ten hit), and the songs' very lack of clear meaning was itself a lyrical subject. "Still don't make no sense," Byrne admitted in "Making Flippy Floppy," but by the next song, "Girlfriend Is Better," that had become an order -- "Stop making sense," he chanted over and over. Some of his charming goofiness had returned since the overly serious Remain in Light and Fear of Music, however, and the accompanying music, filled with odd percussive and synthesizer sounds, could be unusually light and bouncy. The album closer, "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)," even sounds hopeful. Well, sort of. Despite their formal power, Talking Heads' preceding two albums seemed to have painted them into a corner, which may be why it took them three years to craft a follow-up, but on Speaking in Tongues, they found an open window and flew out of it. [In the fall of 2005, Talking Heads' catalog was finally remastered and reissued as DualDiscs, containing a CD on one side and a DVD with 5.1 mixes, along with bonus video material, on the other. Initially, the DualDiscs were only available as a box set, but in 2006, the albums were reissued individually as digipacks (the box set contained all white jewel cases). Speaking in Tongues has just two bonus tracks: the unfinished "Two Note Swivel," which is closer than anything on Fear of Music or Remain in Light to being completed, since David Byrne actually has words in addition to the melody, plus an alternate "Burning Down the House" that isn't as lively as the finished version; the DVD contains videos for "Burning Down the House" and "This Must Be the Place."] ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide