Ken Braun, Record, 8/83

Speaking in Tongues

It’s been almost three years since Talking Heads
released an album of new songs (1980’s Remain In
Light), and a lot has happened with the group in
the interim: it expanded from four to as many as
10 members, toured America and overseas to growing
recognition as one of this era’s best pop groups,
parted ways with longtime producer Brian Eno,
released The Name of this Band Is Talking Heads,
a two-record album which traces the group’s
evolution with live recordings made between 1977
and 1981, and disbanded temporarily while each
of the four "permanent" members--David Byrne,
Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison--
made albums independently of Talking Heads,
prompting speculation about the future of the
group.

Though guest musicians play on most tracks,
Speaking In Tongues underscores the strength of
the basic quartet working together: whereas
Byrne was always the songwriter, collaborating
occasionally with Eno, here Byrne, Frantz,
Harrison and Weymouth share all music credits
equally, and Talking Heads have produced the
album themselves. Instead of picking up where
Remain In Light left off, Speaking In Tongues
picks up where the solo and duo albums of the
past three years left off, consolidating the
developments those albums brought about, balancing
the thick, ornamented weave of guitar and keyboard
lines in Harrison’s The Red and the Black with the;
simple, unpretentious dance funk of Frantz and
Weymouth’s The Tom Tom Club, reining in the in the
rampant adventurism of Byrne and Eno’s My Life In
the Bush of Ghosts with the discipline and purpose-
fulness of Byrne’s The Catherine Wheel. Speaking
In Tongues is, for the most part, better articulated
than Remain In Light and the earlier Fear of Music:
the music is not so dense and cluttered; despite the
problems of collaborative composing, the songs are
more succinct, better crafted, and if they seem less
ambitious it’s because they’re fashioned on the
conclusions of previous experiments; the performances
are more assured; the production is more economical.
Rather than defining new stylistic parameters, the
result improves on established territory. Speaking
In Tongues boasts not a new sound, but a scintillating
refinement of a signature sound.

Exotic sources continue to provide inspiration for
the band: L. Shankar’s electric violin and a
synthesizer’s monkey-chant exclamations give
"Making Flippy-Floppy" an Oriental sound; the
interplay of drums, bass and rhythm guitar and
the use of echo in "I Get Wild/Wild Gravity"
show the influence of dub-wise reggae bands like
Sly & Robbie’s; with its snake-oil guitar and
Byrne’s growled rantings, "Swamp" sounds like
a Howlin’ Wolf hoodoo blues; the exchange between
Byrne and guest vocalists Nona Hendryx and Dolette
McDonald in "Slippery People" recalls African call-
and-response singing; the percussion break in
"Pull Up the Roots" could be mixed into a salsa
record without missing a beat. But none of these
obscure the true roots of Talking Heads’ music--
modern American melting-pot pop, from the Jackson
Five and the 1910 Fruitgum Co. to the
Parliafunkadelicment Thang. Talking Heads have
always made dance music; with Speaking In Tongues
they have made an album that is both glorious dance
music from beginning to end, and--not incidentally--
their most light-hearted effort to date. Of course,
bright wit and high spirits have characterized
Talking Heads’ songs all along--the music as well
as Byrne’s wry but incisive lyrics--even when they
seemed pervaded by irony or a sense of doom; never
before, however, have they been characterized by
so much romance. Byrne has referred to "This Must
Be the Place" as "naive," which may be his way of
confessing that he’s written a pretty song, but
there’s no mistaking it: it is an unabashed love
song.

Hi yo, I got plenty of time
Hi yo, you got light in your eyes
And you’re standing here beside me
I love the passing of time.

The mood is untroubled, blithe, charmed, and it
colors the whole album. It bodes well for the
future of this vital group.