How is it that sometimes, not always but just sometimes, the LP you swore your undying love for and allegiance to back in the day fails, after not having heard it for a long time, to set you on fire? It makes you feel like a turncoat.
Such is the case with Talking Heads’ seminal 1980 LP, Remain in Light. When it came out, I couldn’t find enough good things to say about it; it was flawless, an unparalleled work of synthetic Afrocentric genius, and I would have sworn under oath to the 1981 hearings of the U.S. Senate Commission on Un-American Influences on Rock’n’Roll to that effect. Now it fails to move me as it once did, and I’m left feeling like Benedict Arnold—a traitor to an album I once would have set off firecrackers in my pants for.
On Remain in Light, Talking Heads and co-conspirator Brian Eno eschewed the band’s heretofore twitchy new wave paranoia in favor of a liquid African-based sound that incorporated Byrne’s new stream-of-consciousness approach to writing lyrics, and it worked like gangbusters. Everyone I knew loved it and played it continuously. The hypnotic beats, the great percussion and insane guitars, the syncopated layers of backing vocalists, and David Byrne’s new and more ecstatic vocal delivery all contributed, as did Brian Eno’s far from negligible vision and musical and production skills, to create an album that was truly contagious.
On the LP, Byrne abandoned (for the most part) his characteristic deadpan irony for a potpourri of disparate influences: African rhythms, the fire and brimstone cadences of holy roller preachers, the studied speaking delivery of Nixon underling John Dean’s Watergate testimony (seriously!), and even the new-fangled rap of Kurtis Blow (seriously again!) Throw in a novel free-associative approach to the lyrics and what the Heads ended up with was an album that was radically different from their previous LP, 1979’s excellent Fear of Music.
Remain in Light was more or less demarcated into a “fast” and a “slow” side. I say more or less because “Once in a Lifetime” is on the slow side, where it obviously didn’t belong. As for this critic, I still love Side One as much as I always have; as for Side Two, I think it slows the album down like an anchor. I hear songs like “The Overload” (on which the band attempted to approximate the sound of Joy Division, a group whose music none of them had ever heard) and wonder what I was thinking. It doesn’t suck—none of the songs on Remain in Light suck. But “The Overload” and a couple of other tunes leave me wondering what the band was thinking.
I certainly have no grudge against the uber-funky opening track “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” which is busier than a beehive thanks to layered tracking of bass and punchy percussion, a guitar that blows my mind, and lots of intricately arranged vocals, on top of which Byrne tosses of non sequiturs. “Take a look at these hands,” he sings repeatedly, like Lady Macbeth unable to clean the blood off them, while that guitar does miraculous things and the band repeats the song’s title and Byrne barks, “I’m a tumbler,” amongst other inscrutable things. The wonderfully titled “Crosseyed and Painless” is fast moving and every bit as funky as “Born Under Punches,” and includes more sublimely syncopated backing vocals over which Byrne sings about… well, who knows what he’s free-associating about. The percussion is fantastic, weird sounds whoosh across the aural landscape, and Byrne repeats, “Still waiting.” He even goes into a kind of white boy rap, borrowed from Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” and the song fades out with the band singing, “Still waiting.”
“The Great Curve” moves sinuously towards ecstasy, with a great guitar riff and the usual fantastic percussion and multi-layered backing vocals. And it comes complete with a synthesizer-treated guitar solo by studio ringer Adrian Belew that means business, while Byrne, whose personae had heretofore been robotically asexual, suddenly awakened to the pleasures of the flesh, singing, “The world moves in a woman’s hips.” About time, David. Anyway, this one ends in a sort of counterpoint between two groups of backing vocalists, followed by Belew’s ferocious guitar, which spills electricity all over the studio floor.
On “Once in a Lifetime,” Byrne’s masterpiece, the beat is supersized, the song flows like a fast-moving river, and Byrne takes on the role of a divinely inspired preacher, telling us that we’ve dreamed our way into our present lives, so busy were we thinking about something else. The song is chock full of mystical phrases that Byrne plays variations on: I love his imagery about there being water at the bottom of the ocean, along with the line, “Here comes the twister.” “Same as it ever was,” repeats Byrne over a great guitar solo redolent with feedback, and it’s hard to believe that “Once in a Lifetime,” like every other song on Remain in Light, contains no chord changes, but relies rather on different harmonics and notes.
“Houses in Motion” is cool but sub-par placed next to “Once in a Lifetime”; Byrne speaks the verses while singing the choruses, and the guitar is nice, but the song’s only truly redeeming factor are the lengthy and oddly tuned or manipulated horn solos by Jon Hassell, who manages to make his horn sound like a whistling teapot. The slow “Seen and Not Seen,” on which Byrne speaks in a deadpan voice, frankly bums me out. Okay, so the handclaps and backing vocals work, as do the whooshes of guitar, but all of Byrne’s talk about face molding leaves me totally uninterested. “Listening Wind” similarly does nothing for me; Byrne alternates some hushed spoken voice with singing, and while the background is as coolly busy as on “Houses in Motion” and includes some nifty guitar atmospherics, the song doesn’t have Belew’s frenetic guitar or Hassell’s horn magic to make it anything more than a placeholder on the LP. It’s a song about a terrorist; make it interesting for Christ’s sake.
“The Overload” is a disappointing closer, a bass-heavy dirge on which Byrne talks while submarine noises sound behind him. It drags like a tattoo needle across your skull, spelling out the words, “This song’s a bummer.” The band may have been attempting to approximate the sound of a Joy Division song, but “The Overload” includes none of Ian Curtis’ desperation and comes across as a mere sound experiment. What’s more, it runs counter to the better part of the rest of the album, which Byrne himself described as “joyous and ecstatic.” No joy here; “The Overload” is a slow and unheated train ride to the Gulag, a tombstone in a children’s playground, and I really wish the band had gone out on an up note.
Remain in Light is still a great LP, bold and avant garde, a stab in the dark by a band willing to take enormous risks. Only a fool would say it sucks. But its second side is a drag, and does its best to pull the first side down in its undertow. That it fails is a testament to the brilliance of the songs on Side One; they’re punchy, exciting, and even “spiritual,” a term Byrne himself used to describe the LP. If I no longer adore the damn thing, it has everything to do with the unnecessary ballast of songs like “The Overload.” The band should have stayed true to its punchy and slap-happy vision, and it doesn’t. As a result the album as a whole moves with a slight limp, when it should be a dance, one of the coolest dances you’ve ever seen.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
