Jon Pareles, Rolling Stone, 11/15/79

How to Live with 'Fear' ?

Time stands still when you're cracking up. At the
brink of mental overload, there's a revelatory
instant--a freeze frame in which everything fits
together in new ways. Logic dissolves, paralogic
reigns. And in that precarious moment, the world
is fixed in place, skewed and renewed.

David Byrne's lyrics on Talking Heads' Fear of
Music are paralogical visions stated with almost
childlike directness: he thinks that air hits
him in the face, that animals want to change his
life, that "someone controls electric guitar."
By itself, this perspective makes Byrne's songs
fascinating. But what makes Talking Heads my
favorite and probably the best rock band anywhere
is that they've invented an audio analog to their
view from the brink: rock music that warps and
suspends time.

They use a simple device: repetition. Unswerving
rhythms, immobile harmonies. Each tune is a chain
of sections linked by rhythm, each section a matrix
of interlocking riffs. "I Zimbra" stakes Talking
Heads' claim to pure mechanization. One by one, the
instruments click into place in a rhythm pattern
fleshed out by Afro-futurist harmonies and topped
by the meaningless chanted syllables of a poem by
Twenties Dadaist Hugo Ball. At composition's end,
Robert Fripp's guitar phases through the whole
pulsing assemblage like the shuttle of a high-speed
loom.

Even in the more conventional numbers--those built
on ordinary major and minor chords--anything
repeatable gets repeated. "Heaven," Byrne sings in
his minimalist anthem of the same name, "is a place
where nothing ever happens," and while his songs
aren't by any means completely static, their
harmonies don't move as fast as most pop progressions
do. When a tune lingers on one chord, riffs that go
with that chord are played over and over. As for
rhythm, drummer Chris Frantz will sometimes hold
one lick for an entire cut: for example, the
steady hi-hat eighth notes he plays throughout
"Mind" and "Heaven." It's deliberately mechanical,
but because the riffs are complexly intertwined and
there's a solid backbeat, the repetition doesn't
inspire Kraftwerk-style boredom or disco claustrophobia.
Instead, there's a sense of time being held at bay.

Yet Byrne's vocals keep the music in the present
tense. He sings like a Mouseketeer trapped in an
endless anything-can-happen day: rattled, wide-eyed,
quavery, breaking into glossolalia whenever he runs
out of words. Sometimes he slides into sync with
the other members of the band, sometimes he dithers
above them in lunatic abandon. Though his cohorts
play like an efficient machine, David Byrne
maintains the beauty of human error.

Last year's More Songs About Buildings and Food
signaled that the group, on its second album, had
perfected its tech-mech music. The LP was a manic,
oddly funky, hard-edged, catchy masterpiece. On Fear
of Music, Talking Heads take that style and proceed
to torture-test it under every distortion they and
coproducer Brian Eno can devise. "Animals," with its
dissonance and odd meters (5/4 and 7/4), radically
extends the band's musical vocabulary, while other
liberties (the jumpy, angular countermelody in "Air,"
Tina Weymouth's off-the-beat bass line in "Mind")
are infiltrated into the more "normal"-sounding
numbers. And the new record is programmed to emphasize
its most ominous cuts: it opens with "I Zimbra,"
winds up side one with "Memories Can't Wait," and
closes side two with "Animals," "Electric Guitar"
and "Drugs." Whereas More Songs About Buildings
and Food was crisp and outgoing, Fear of Music is
often deliberately, brilliantly disorienting. Like
its black, corrugated packaging (which resembles a
manhole cover), the album is foreboding, inescapably
urban and obsessed with texture.

Fear of Music is Talking Heads' most elaborate
production so far, teeming with overdubs and effects
the group doesn't try to reproduce in concert.
Sounds emerge out of nowhere, echoes tangle the beat,
instrumental timbres form unholy alloys. For the LP's
spookiest tune, "Memories Can't Wait," the mix is as
murky as a film-noir interior. Byrne's vocal is
echoed, reverbed, tape-reversed and dizzyingly sped
up while he sings about an endless "party in my mind."
In the final verse, when suddenly "Everything is very
quiet," his voice slips out front, the key changes
and the echoes slink away. It's hardly subtle, but
it works.

"Drugs" is a radical reworking of a song the band
had been performing live and calling "Electricity."
Onstage, "Electricity" was an easygoing, almost
countryish, guitar-vamp number. On Fear of Music,
Eno and Talking Heads eliminate the vamp, reverse
the beat, stick a bell on every downbeat (like
Jimmy Cliff's "Sitting in Limbo"), change some
lyrics, rewrite the bridge in a different key and
fill the hole left by the vamp with echoes and
strange noises, including slow breathing, garbled
voices and--just when the tune threatens to get too
serious--what sounds like a bullfrog croak.

Though New Wave conservatives may be appalled at
such elaborate studio tinkering, the songs don't
suffer a bit. They're not sweetened--they're
seasoned. In "Mind," Byrne double-tracks his
vocals in ragged octaves on the chorus (which
is inspired: e.g., "I need something to change
your mind"), ostensibly making it twice as plaintive.
But all the while, a giddy, slapstick synthesizer
line is busy cutting away any trace of sentiment.

For me, Fear of Music's least interesting track
is the rock-disco like "Life During Wartime,"
which sounds almost live. The problem isn't the
production but the song itself. While "Life During
Wartime" is both structurally and harmonically
conventional, boasts a silly chorus lyric and even
adds a conga player to the group, the tune's real
trouble is that it lacks Talking Heads' usual
counterpoint. On the other hand, some of the words
are arresting: "I got three passports, a couple
of visas/You don't even know my real name."

Byrne has drastically shifted his verbal approach
for Fear of Music. In his lyrics for earlier records,
he let himself be self-conscious: he'd observe,
analyze and make judgments. His new lyrics virtually
eliminate abstraction--he doesn't consider, he feels.
There's very little past and no future, just a jumble
of sensations, as if it's all he can do to handle
right now. The songs are invariably in the first
person and mention very few outside characters:
the singer's inner world is his last refuge.

This way lies solipsism perhaps. But David Byrne's
private, paranoid universe is dangerously close to
yours and mine. "Cities," in which a homeless Byrne
has to find himself a "city to live in," fades in
with a riff and the sound of sirens. I'd played
Fear of Music more than a dozen times before I
realized the sirens weren't outside my window.



Contributed by Steve Czapla