Talking Heads released four albums in their first four years of recording and they're all classics in their own way. Their second (slightly overrated) album More Songs about Buildings and Food, Their third (criminally underrated) Fear of Music and their fourth (generally correctly rated) Remain in Light all deserve their own spot on this blog but i've decided to stick with one album per band so i'm going with thier first (often not rated at all) Talking Heads '77.I am commonly a fan of first albums. They tend to fall into one of two categories. The first category is the album where the band has not quite found their sound but you can hear those hints of promise. These are always interesting listens in an almost historic way. But it's the second category that gets me excited. That's when you get the sound of a raw, hungry youth. It's the sound of a band that doesn't care about the rules or the money or even the art, to an extent. What they care about is putting every bit of their inexperience, anger, fear, confusion and sex into a bucket, mixing it all up and setting it on fire. This is the sound that is made before the corruption of celebrity and all that comes with it, seeps into the cracks. That's when a band often falls into the trap of either trying to recreate their lost innocence or going on some kind of musical soul-search that ends with the discovery of a sitar.
Now i'm happy to say that Talking Heads never really fell into those traps but there is still a quality to this first album that they never quite captured again. They took all those things listed above (anger, fear, confusion, sex) and put them on display and somehow it came out sounding a little bit like a party.
This is music to to dance to; to sing along with. It's catchy and quirky and fun. Then you notice that there is a very uneasy voice singing these songs and the words to the songs are just as uneasy. "Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town" and "Tentative Decisions" are sort of like sweet songs about love but they're also sort of about the way love can mess with your life and make things even more complicated than they already are. Those feelings can be summed up in one of the lyric "Watch out baby 'cause I'm in love with you and if you don't love me I don't know what I'm gonna do" (from "Who Is It?"). Beyond that we get such fun subjects as the remorseless apathy of "No Compassion" and the strains of "Don't Worry about the Government" which is so positive about the way things are that you can't help but to wonder what's really going on in that "1984"/"Stepford Wives" sort of way. Suddenly you realize that you're dealing with a bunch of weirdos.Then it gets really weird on the most famous song from this album, tucked away towards the end, "Psycho Killer."
What really makes this song disturbing is that upon repeated listens, you notice that this song isn't about just some random "psycho killer," it's about a very specific one... you. It speaks to every one of us who has ever dealt with a co-worker or family member or customer (for those in customer service) that crawled under our skin in a way nobody should be able to. This is the song that plays as we cross that line from fantasizing about strangling the person to actually placing our hands around their neck and squeezing with every bit of strength we can gather, whispering to ourselves "I hate people when they're not polite."This is a weird youth; this is weird fire; this is weird inexperience, anger, fear, confusion and sex. This is weird... but hey, it's still sounds a little bit like a party.
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and for the nerds, check out Psycho Killer by a 3-piece (!) Talking Heads at CBGB's from 1975 (!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDtFTysmExg
[this looks better at http://www.theinconsideratemixtape.com/]
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