Right, **** it. I need a midway point between Love and Meh, so suck it. Orange is for Like.
Title: Talking Heads 77
Artist: Talking Heads
Genre: New Wave/Art Punk
Artist Reaction: Anything I’ve heard by them I like
Genre Reaction: n/a; I know who Talking Heads are so the genre is immaterial
Familiarity: Just the singles, and i think Little Creatures? Oh, and Stop Making Sense
Suggested by: Neapolitan
Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town: Breezy and upbeat from the off, with David Byrne’s falsetto taking centre stage, nice Caribbean feel thanks to the steel pan
New Feeling: Another boppy, uptempo number, again driven by Byrne’s somewhat manic vocal
Tentative Decisions: Kind of stilted, reminds me of Ric Ocasek’s work with The Cars (god rest his soul) with a nice rolling almost military drumbeat. Some pretty fine guitar work. And some cool piano too.
Happy Day: Like the organ in this, but I have to say (ducks) nothing has actually reached out and grabbed me about this so far. I like it, but sure I don’t love it. I’m not listening to this, Talking Heads’ debut, and thinking, why didn’t I hear this a long time ago? It’s good, but just that. So far.
Who Is It?: Quite funky this one. Can’t say a lot more about it to be honest.
No Compassion: Good rocky one here, interesting lyric. Like the guitar riff.
The Book I Read: More funky guitar here. The organ lines are very effective. Good, upbeat cheerful melody and again Byrne holds court over everything here.
Don’t Worry About the Government: Whimsical melody, given the lyrical matter. Piano sounds a little Supertramp-like.
First Week/Last Week… Carefree: There’s definitely a Latin influence in most of their music, quite evident in the rhythm here.
Psycho Killer: Ah well everyone knows this so I won’t attempt to write anything further about it.[
Pulled Up: Like the clanging guitar in this, reminds me a little of early Police, touches of The Jam there too. A pretty frenetic ending.
Conclusion: I doubt I’ll ever be a real Talking Heads fan. I like their singles and I can appreciate their place in music history, but while I liked this album I found it hard to pick out any reasons why it resonates with me, and realised it really doesn’t. It’s not that I don’t like it, I just can’t point to anything that might be so great about it. Definitely wasn’t bored, but wasn’t exactly entertained either. I’ll expect the hate mail to fill up my inbox so go right ahead.
So, Love or Hate? I can't Meh it, so it's getting a
Like. Can't do any better than that. Hey! Watch where you're throwing that thing! That nearly hit me!
