“Bullet,” for example, is set to jaunty, percolating synths as Byrne merrily sings of a bullet passing through a victim’s flesh “ on its merry way,” sticking with the object’s perspective to render a kind of Little Engine That Could narrative around the piece of lead forging ahead through obstacles. Byrne makes this point explicitly on “Dog’s Mind” when he notes “ Now a dog cannot imagine what it is to drive a car/ And we in turn are limited by what it is we are.” “Doing the Right Thing” acts as an earnest update to “Once in a Lifetime,” finding the yuppie protagonist, perhaps humbled and sobered by age, recession or any other factors, now gazes over his normal life and feels an intense gratitude and a hope that he has earned his modest comfort.Īs clear as this thesis is, Byrne can sometimes rend it abstract and ironic. The implication of the statement is clear, that concepts of utopia are necessarily limited by our imagination and intellectual capacity, and that any failure to conceive of a perfect world is a fault of our own thinking, not of any inherent possibility for change. His goals and method come into sharp detail on “Every Day Is a Miracle,” in which he describes how, to a chicken, heaven would simply be full of roosters and corn. The artist approaches the concept of the album title sincerely, if with a fair amount of cheek. To whip these wild intersections of Western and global influences together, Byrne collects them around a pervading lyrical theme of optimism that suits his universal sensibilities. “Everybody’s Coming to My House” even manages to update that aforementioned Afrobeat fixation, adding dubby textures to funky, propulsive drumming, as well as faint groans of saxophone, squeaking lines of guitar, Bootsy Collins space bass and galloping cowbell. ![]() The oscillations between twee lounge pop and shuddering, nervous dance music prefigure an album of clashing styles, yet there’s something about this awkward funk that is so classically Byrne, sounding nothing like the Fela Kuti-cribbing rave-ups of Talking Heads but nonetheless drawn from the same tetchy, white boy dance urge.Įlsewhere, “It’s Not Dark Up Here” threads blurts of jazzy guitar through paranoid, skittering beats that eventually spill into something approaching a boogie “Every Day Is a Miracle” is sunny calypso so bright you can practically see sunbeams bouncing off the mallet instruments. ![]() Opener “I Dance Like This” is a massive feint, gently rolling out on a descending piano riff as Byrne quirkily sings lines like “ In another dimension, like the clothes that you wear” before it suddenly lurches into cod-industrial, complete with a chorus manipulated and stretched by electronics. The result is his most cohesive work in ages, and a surprising highlight of the year so far.īyrne’s catch-as-catch-can approach to music means that he traverses wide stylistic gaps, often within the same songs. American Utopia, Byrne’s first solo credit in 14 years, is fittingly shed of overt distraction, retaining his eccentricity but concentrating it around an organizing theme. The sheer elasticity of his global tastes makes each release and collaboration a crapshoot, qualitatively speaking, with the intentional inconsistency of his sound making for compelling but frustratingly unfocused albums. David Byrne’s wandering musical spirit has defined his post-Talking Heads career even more than his time with the protean post-punk legends.
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