Check out these nerds getting cheeky with album titles already on their sophomore effort. Let's call attention straight away to the opinion some people have that we're dry and boring, that way we beat those critics at their own game! Actually, the real story is that they couldn't come up with a title, so they made fun of the fact that they weren't able to come up with a title by coming up with that title. I think the cover art is really cool, and certainly a 180° flip on the level of effort involved compared with the minimalism of the debut album art. 529 Polaroid snapshots, which means somebody luckier than me had to get right up nice and close to David Byrne's crotch. Imagine standing still that whole time while a photographer took each photo. That's some OK Go music video level of tedium right there.
I've been thinking a lot in the last week or so about how I truly feel about this album. For sure, Talking Heads are very diverse between albums, but inter-album diversity leaves a lot to be desired. More Songs... is their jangly, rhythm-heavy guitar record. There is a lot of repetitive interplay between Byrne and Harrison while Weymouth keeps it steady with her funky bass on most of these 11 songs, and even after multiple listens everything seems coalesced into one big slab of angular, jagged, anxious guitar. Melody and mood both take a backseat, so the audio color palette is incredibly narrow.
Sit down with a group of Talking Heads fans to discuss More Songs... and I'd imagine each person's two personal favorite tracks won't overlap drastically. For me, the standouts are the opener "Thank You For Sending Me an Angel" for its sheer optimistic driving rhythm, and "Found a Job" with its offbeat lyrics and energetic, hypnotic jam at the end. As a whole, the album is a grower, but after 12 years of listening to it I can't say that I find it as charming as do most people I see lauding it on review sites and message boards. It also doesn't help that the next two albums are significantly, significant, significantly better, but I digress.
Lyrically, this album is chock full of quirky, early-Heads non-poetic poetry that doesn't depart from the first album's aesthetic whatsoever. The aforementioned "Found a Job", a song that I believe is about a married couple who uses their mutual hatred of TV to strengthen their failing relationship, jarringly starts with one of my favorite Talking Heads lines of all time, "DAMN! That! Television!/What a bad picture!". The slightly obnoxious "The Girls Want to Be with the Girls" is another Battle of the Sexes pep talk therapy session that's awfully reminiscent of Talking Heads: 77's "Tentative Decisions", and just as obtuse. "The Good Thing" has no pretense of romanticism with it's ultra-cold (and hilarious) corporate business jargon of a chorus to describe intangible concepts ("As the heart finds the good thing, the feeling is multiplied/Add the will to the strength and it equals conviction/As we economize, efficiency is multiplied/To the extent I am determined the result is the good thing"). It's all Byrne being Byrne, as we are coming to find out, and whether everything makes sense to the audience is not his fucking problem as far as he's concerned! But you do have to admit that, for a band with a lot of criticisms of pomposity, you can't really listen to these lyrics and cry "pretentious!". Save that for the super-serious, overwrought garbage that your average progressive metal band will try to pass off as meaningful lyrical soul-bearing. This is just fun shit, mang.
While I can, at worst, tolerate each and every song on Talking Heads: 77, I find all the closing tunes on More Songs.. starting from "I'm Not in Love" to be a real goddamn slog. I think by the time I finish out "Artists Only" I've already felt like I've gotten the gist. "I'm Not in Love" and "Stay Hungry" are disposable, relatively low-energy robo-Asperger's "love songs" that I don't think work very well here in early-Heads territory with the overall mood. "Take Me to the River" is a cover of Al Green's song. I've never heard the original before, but the positive thing I can say about this Talking Heads version is that it doesn't sound like the rest of the album. Other than that it has never really done anything for me. "The Big Country" is the longest song here, kind of a droning cool-down after the onslaught of the rest of the record, and probably the first genuinely emotionally resonating attempt by the band thus far. I do have a hard time with this one, because on one hand the somber melody and the lyrics about disillusionment about the Great American Way of Life kind of pluck the emotional strings in a gentle, enjoyable, yet odd way, and on the other hand...the song just kind of keeps going and going. Plus, I think they tackled this subject better with "(Nothing But) Flowers" on their final album Naked.
Moving past my own personal hangups with More Songs..., this record is considered a gem of the new wave scene. A lot of the credit goes to the slick production of one Mr. Brian Eno, whose talents combined with Byrne's are a match made in heaven. BUT, while More Songs... certainly feels fuller and less sparse and isolated compared with Talking Heads: 77, Eno is a guy well-known for enhancing moods, or even creating moods that the instruments alone aren't fully conveying, and I think he falters a bit here. I don't get an Eno vibe from More Songs..., and I've heard my fair share of Eno-fied albums. SEE, even when I start a paragraph with ambitions to move past my own personal hangups I have to ruin it by whining.
Fuck it, maybe on a really good day this album has what it takes to get the semen shooting out the ol' dick (pardon the common Victorian-era expression), but I've been incredibly lukewarm about it forever and I'm not going to bump up my opinion because of everyone else. You'll probably love it, though, knowing you and your milquetoast bourgeois banality. Fie!
JUST OK
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