Blogcritics Comments on CD Review: Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings And Food

Comment by Douglas Mays

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:45:15 EST

Well, between my ear and my brain I have my own sound studio. It all get pretty close...Even on the most "technicallly advanced" I still have to make adjustments for my own liking.

Comment by John Owen

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 12:36:25 EST

That reminds me of a story my granddad once told me about when he was in medical school. When he was doing his residency there was a senior doctor who would question everything you did, down to peering at the syringes you were about to stick into someone's leg to make sure you had EXACTLY the correct volume of medication. Well, my granddad quickly figured out that if he turned around, did absolutely nothing, turned back, and said "okay, how's that," the guy would look at the syringe again and say, "that's much better." I smell what you're cooking. Without a/b-ing components, I'm sure the ear can imagine all sorts of amazing things when comparing from memory.

Comment by Mark Saleski

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 20:10:16 EST

john, it's not that i lose them so much...it that i question certain abilities. for instance, mostly when somebody is auditioning, say, a new pair of interconnects to go between the cd player and the preamp, they listen for a good long while with the 'old' pair. then...they shut it all down and install the new pair. then they'll be making commentary about certain qualities such as the crispness of the stick on the ride cymbal, or the decay of a crash cymbal. unless i can listen to something in an a/b sort of manner, it seems impossible to judge one setup vs. the other based on the qualities of musical events that i don't exactly have completely lodged in my brain. i'm not saying that there are not differences, it's just not my cup of tea, so to speak.

Comment by Douglas Mays

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 19:16:22 EST

First of all, good review. MSAB&F is a great album. An album that brought 'new wave/punk' to the masses (ah, we might tip our hats to the Cars for that also). hhhmmm...good to bring up the technology end of things also. For instance, some indy bands are mass producing on the CD-R format. Good! Save some money by not overpressing. But some retailers get all anal and want glass masters only. Piss on that. They all play the same and sound just as good. It is almost like the analog/digital war in the digital world. I say that if it plays, put it out. Don't let the arrogance of technology stop you. Anyway, T-Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food is an all-time great album.

Comment by John Owen

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 13:35:35 EST

That's totally where they lose me. I mean, I'm glad there's people out there talking about that, because it means better audio equipment for me, but man. That's some sausage I don't need to see being made.

Comment by Mark Saleski

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:40:28 EST

you want to see really weird descriptions of music/sounds? you should check out some of the high end audio rags. these are usually in the context of evaluating the esoterics of things like interconnect cables and the like.

Comment by Rodney Welch

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:26:58 EST

John, Agreed on the hacky thing above. I hate that shit too. Maybe I'm just coming at this from being a musical illiterate, really -- I can't read music or play a guitar or anything, so the music writing I most like describes sound and feeling and depth and texture in a compellingly personal way.

Comment by John Owen

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:21:47 EST

Rodney, that's interesting. I think I approach the idea of critiquing production a little differently than you do. I mean, I often like to read film reviews that take into account camera technique, film stock choice, etc., when those decisions have a measurable impact on the point of the review. I also have spent a little time in the studio, and therefore can be persuaded to geek out on matters of microphone placement. I do totally agree that too much of this can really bog down an otherwise brisk and informative piece, and it's a hard thing to manage. In the case of the Heads, I wrote this review just after having my ears really opened for the first time by the 5.1 mix and by the different balance of the sound in the video clips. I mean, holy crap. There's stuff in there I never, ever heard before. And I think that's important. (Or at least i did last night when I was writing it. I can't pretend to be either authoritative or objective.) And now I understand better what kinds of noises David Byrne made on the guitar, and what kinds of noises were Jerry Harrison's, and a whole bunch of other perhaps clinical information that isn't of first-order importance but really adds to the experience for me. You've got a great point about the Modern Lovers. I could also mention The Slits and a bunch of British bands who were also subbing in "irony" for "sex" in rock and whatnot, and whose sound was similarly herky-jerky. But for me the difference is that the Heads did it for about fifteen years, and became very famous in the process, which sets them apart.

Comment by Mark Saleski

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:18:38 EST

I simply cannot disentangle my own relationship with a piece of music from my experience of it yep, i'm with ya there. another reason i started writing this stuff is because those kind of reportage-style reviews are just plain boring.

Comment by John Owen

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:12:15 EST

Yeah, Mark!! That's just the problem. Music reviewers have the difficult task of telling people about new sounds. And as Rodney pointed out, that can become tedious fast. "Purple swirls of echo guitar float above a turbulent lanscape of burbling drums and dubby bass while otherwordly caterwauling darts in from all sides." And junk like that. But on the other hand, the danger of eschewing that in favor of exclusively "sounds like" comparisons, is that that approach can get hacky real, real fast. "The Widgets are like The Cramps... plus Weezer... plus this band you've never heard of... but in kind of a K Records way!" That review you linked is a good case in point (and very nicely done, I might add). You did a good job of acknowledging the limitations of words to describe how new sounds, um, sound, and did it efficently and without undue handwaving. I wonder, how did the first guy to eat a strawberry describe it to his friends? Heck, how would you describe the flavor of a strawberry? But then again, we write about music, and attention must be paid in some degree to what it actually sounds like. This is especially true when you are writing for what you must assume is a naive audience who don't have automatic signposts for what you're talking about. In the past I've resorted to onomatopoeia, adjective overload, the "Sonic Youth shagging Dinosaur, Jr. in the backseat of a Death Cab" gambit, and a bunch of artsyfartsy handwaving about songcraft. All these approaches are valid, but they are each an attempt to overcome the inherent limitations of trying to type the experience of listening. The other difficult issue is that of objectivity. Do you write a "balanced" review as if it were reportage, or do you write about how you reacted to the song or album? Each way has its strengths and weaknesses, but as far as I'm concerned as a writer, I simply cannot disentangle my own relationship with a piece of music from my experience of it. I read reportage-style reviews all the time in Drooling Stone or the Boston Phoenix that help me to judge the relative merits of a new album, but I can't imagine that those reviews are particularly fun to write. "Make it snazzy, but not too personal!!" Great. Next I'll go have lunch blindfolded with a clothespin on my nose.

Comment by Rodney Welch

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:04:44 EST

John, I hesitated making that first point because it sounded mean. But it suddenly just struck me while reading your review that my eyes always kind of glaze over and rush through any paragraph in a review where the mix comes into play, where the reviewer starts talking about sound placement, whether the vocal is upfront here or the drum is obscured there, etc., etc. -- it starts sounding like it came from a tech journal and, more importantly, departs from the emotional core of a record. Granted, a good reviewer achieves distance from his subject and doesn't want to sound like a raving fan who doesn't have his thoughts under control, but it all begins to sound rather clinical. I'm the same way with movie reviews. My main beef with reviewers of every stripe is that they don't always bother to answer the key question: How did it hit you? They don't put their response from and center. They back away from it and talk around it. Of course, when I say this to you it's almost really like I'm talking to myself, because when I write about music (rarely) and try to capture the sound in a specific way I always find myself fumbling, to the point where I almost want to scream at my own copy: "Stop being so damn boring." And that's partly why I said what I did -- when the reviewer pretends he's sitting in the control booth there's a certain strain in the writing. On the other hand, I greatly admire anyone who can really pull this off well. I admire great jazz writers like Stanley Crouch and Nat Hentoff because they can do something I can never do. As for the distinctness of the Talking Heads' sound. I'm not entirely sure I buy your point. I've loved the band from the beginning, and love their sound, and found it jarring and off-kilter as I did Television -- but I felt that way (and still do) about a lot of the punks. For me sound was only part of the Heads' distinction. I think a lot of their value is in their personality, which is basically Byrne's personality on the early records. The idea behind the Heads always seemed to boil down to this: take a form, rock and roll, which is all about action, sex, violence, and macho swagger, give it a huge dose of irony, and make it about everything else instead. Of course, when you get right down to it they weren't the first to tackle this, exactly: Jerry Harrison's old band, the Modern Lovers, were making Talking Heads music well before the Talking Heads (e.g., "Government Center.")

Comment by Mark Saleski

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:26:39 EST

oooh, good topic. see, one of the reasons i started writing reviews was that it annoyed me when i reviewer made no attempt at all to convey what the music sounded like. this happened more on pop and rock stuff than instrumental material. here's an example of my approach, Craig Taborn's Junk Magic. i mean, i'm not sure what i would have said about it if i didn't try to describe the sounds...maybe just refer to other artists, tho in this case that would have been difficult. impossible even.

Comment by John Owen

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:13:42 EST

Rodney, that's an interesting point. How does one, in written language, convey the sensory experience of listening to music? I long ago gave up trying to fight it - even though I'm with you in sometimes finding reading such descriptions to be a feat of endurance - because sometimes that's what's important. I mean, I could probably write an entire review of a new Rolling Stones album without once having to resort to dependent clauses stuffed with a trainwreck of adjectives and metaphors, because how they sound is probably going to be less important than whether or not the album lives up to the fairly modest goal of being as good as Bridges to Babylon, and whether it does any service at all to the band's legacy beyond that. But the Heads! Oh my God! Talking Heads were sonically different from what was around at the time, and have become important not for being influential, IMHO, but for doing something that nobody else has done as well since. Which is huge! The only band I can think of that sounds much like Talking Heads is their New York philos-to-phy reading cousins Television, and they were after a different thing. Your other point, about authorial voice, is interesting too. I recently reviewed the new Hank Williams III album, and in the course of the review attributed the voice of most of the songs to Hank himself. (I think I questioned that assumption once, maybe.) But Hank III is a country artist, and like blues artists before them, tend to work in one of two modes: balladry, and confessional. You don't go hear George Jones live in concert to hear him sing about other people like it's story-time, you go hear George Jones because he's so good at selling the song like it happened to him personally. Hell, I don't think Robert Johnson actually went down to the crossroads, but the first-person personal history voice is the one that works best in context. When you sign on for the song, you willingly suspend disbelief. (Also too, some artists (George Jones) make it easier to buy into their work by living out what they sing about (drunken wreck)). Come to think of it, this is what made Sinatra great too. But David Byrne. Who was the real David Byrne? To go back to Television for a second, the lyrics to "Venus de Milo," for example, are in the first person, and the easiest thing to assume is that it's the singer or songwriter placing himself, as himself, in the scene at fictional events, "falling sideways laughing, with a friend from Anastasia's" and so on. But on "Psycho Killer," for example, even though it's set in the first person, there's not much doubt that David Byrne hasn't himself worn someone's guts for garters. And although I'm sure something in his personality and makeup comes through in his songs, I tend to take his lyrics as written with an authorial voice, as excellent little Raymond Carver short stories that happen to rhyme. Which is why "The Big Country" is so odd. In that freaky little essay I mentioned that's included in the DVD bonus extras, there's a lot about how the country gestures in the song serve to complicate the question of who exactly is communicating in the song, Byrne himself or a character he's written. So clearly, David Byrne was tripping out on the default confessional mode of country music and wanted to play around with it. And although at first I was like all "dude, please. Get over yourself," the more I think about it I'm like "yeah, dude!" Just by dint of the fact that the lyric to "The Big Country" hangs together more than the lyrics on the rest of the album seems to break down the fourth wall, like Byrne looking up from the book he's been reading to us to address us directly. But again, he's such a cerebral bastard, that it's impossible to tell what's really going on. Hm. John Owen: pretentious much?

Comment by Rodney Welch

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 10:38:27 EST

You do your usual excellent, thorough job -- although, personally, I tend to hate it when people try to describe what music sounds like; it's almost always a challenge for the writer and an endurance contest for the listener. That said, I love this record too, and you make an interesting comparison with The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, which I agree is a wonderful document. Among other things, More Songs is a very funny record. The title of course is a joke -- a very boring description of a lively record made by a band almost at the top of their game. I still laugh when I hear "Found a Job." (You've gotta love a song that begins: "Damn that television! What a bad picture!") "The Big Country" has always been a little bit of a puzzle to me. I wondered if it was Byrne talking or a Byrne character. The speaker seems to be some artsy Manhattan snob who is pondering flyover country -- a country full of pigs, raising food and eating it. When he says "I wouldn't live there if you paid me," I think he means anywhere but New York or L.A. He's looking at a world where artsy types don't exist and wouldn't be welcomed, a world where farmers and truck drivers and dullards have taken over. You know -- people without 5.1 DVD systems.

Comment by Connie Phillips

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 08:52:41 EST

Wonderful review!! As you mention, who can deny their videos broke ground in the 80s. They broke new ground, and are the ones most people think of when they think of early MTV.

Comment by Gordon Hauptfleisch

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:45:14 EST

Great review--well-written, comprehensive.

Comment by Aaman

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 04:33:16 EST

Marvelous review of an excellent album - I am just about to spin up the Heads on musicnow.com after this review:)