It's Not Yesterday Anymore
Talking Heads, "New Feeling" (live) - In the process of sitting around all day yesterday trying as hard as I can to keep from rushing out to the record store and torching a gift certificate one day before I'd be going to the record store anyway, I was suddenly seized by the remembrance that we are all about to be crushed under the joyous weight of a billion incredibly promising reissues of the Talking Heads' catalogue starting the week of January 10th. I actually haven't heard any of the remasters yet even though they've been taunting me over the internet for a good little while now; this is because I will admit that on occasion I can get really slack-assed about buying music after plowing through the actual task/joy of listening to the music, and frankly I'd be pretty disgusted with myself if I had to go and be oh-so-very-modern as to talk myself into curating a record collection that doesn't include Remain In fucking Light. I mean, with the Strokes' new one, it wasn't ever in question as to whether or not I'd buy it; the Strokes are (generally speaking) my favorite rock and/or roll band in God's America, and by copping the leak I was mostly just giving in to the curiosity as to whether or not I'd be able to keep calling them that (mission accomplished, obviously). Remain In Light, of course, is not that kind of situation at all; it is the kind of capital-g Great album which excels at "having substance" and "being really fun to listen to" in equal measures, the kind of thing you might have expected if Lee Perry had made a full album with the Clash instead of just "Complete Control". Buying it again is basically like replacing my copy of Emerson essays with a hardback; it is full of the kind of greatness that doesn't necessarily require you to immerse yourself in order to see which dots it connects in your life.
Except for that then there's "New Feeling", taken from 2004's reissue/CD debut of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads live masterpiece. Like I said, I haven't downloaded any of the studio album reissues, but even if I'd been listening to them since the day they hit the net I still doubt I'd have anything better than "New Feeling" to post as far as selling y'all on the idea of spending money on records you already own. It's very possible that I've never gotten so much from a remaster as I have from The Name of This Band; at the very least, it's certainly the site of the remaster most responsible for making me reconsider what I like about a band, which is probably not too shabby when you consider that, to paraphase Chuck Klosterman, all remasters ever do is just make stuff louder.
Thing is, they really made the right stuff louder. The Name of This Band, in addition to being a very great CD in its own right and one of my very favorite albums of 2004, is also one of those listening experiences that stayed with me in a way that seems important; I can still remember driving back from Collateral and hearing this song (disc one, track one) for the first time and thinking "Okay, cool, I definitely haven't wasted my money this time". AND THEN CAME THAT GUITAR SOLO - that telegraph-line shook-one indie-disco jangleblast hammering on my neurotransmitters in a way that none of their other stuff - not even Remain In Light - ever managed to do. And then I remembered that that was also a lie, and that this song (and most of the subsequent ones) was rubbing my mind's genitals pretty much exactly like Stop Making Sense, an album I snuck out of my parents' CD racks when I was in the eighth grade and still have to this day, primarily because I can't think of many better examples of a band sounding like they're having a good time on stage committed to record (to this day, I still prefer the Stop Making Sense version of "Life During Wartime", mostly on the basis of its efforts to sound as much like a Cameo song as possible). And then I started wondering if I was overrating The Name of This Band in my head already, given how no matter how much fun this stuff was, this was still the same band that came up with the aforementioned Remain In Light, and hey whaddyaknow all of a sudden I was right there thinking about the Talking Heads again. Mission accomplished, I guess; maybe we should be on the lookout for David Byrne landing on a flightdeck somewhere.
The Talking Heads are a great band, and to be certain they came up with both very great songs and very great albums, but even back when I was ranting and raving to all my less-than-fever-pitched friends about the virtues of Remain In Light or Speaking In Tongues or, fuck, even just "Heaven", I never actually felt any ownership over the music; I might as well have been describing a particularly cool museum exhibit. But The Name of This Band, on the other hand, turned me into an evangelist; I still put "New Feeling" on people's mix CDs as recently as last night, mostly because right now in the Oh Six, even after the song's been around for twenty years, it's still transparently obvious which bits are the fun bits. Needless to say, I'm more than a little excited at the prospect of a release of Remain In Light engineered to sound good in the right-now. Men's heads have spontaneously exploded when confronted with less. (Click here to buy The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads from Amazon)
The Automatic, "Recover" - I doubt very much that the Automatic would appreciate me telling the world that the very first thought their song triggered in me was "What, is Christopher Guest making a movie about all these nu-wave bands now?", but I'm'a do it anyway. I actually don't even totally mean it as anything critical, to be honest; I mean, yeah I doubt that these guys are going to be pushing this single on their kids after they turn forty (your frame of reference for this should be the Editors), but it's just as worthwhile to point out that this is a nigh-unto impeccable slab of tunesmanship regardless of whether or not it mortifies You The Listener. Unsurprisingly, it's as much a studio creation as a musical one; the song is an orgy of double-tracking and sizzling hi-hats courtesy of Ian Broudie, and if there's a dancefloor on this earth where this kind of pop music actually plays I bet this song just fucking kills. But I don't want to make it sound like the Automatic themselves were just accomplices at the birth of their first kid; I may not necessarily buy into the sincerity behind the vocals, for instance, but "Recover" is one of those songs packed with so many slick little touches (most notably the way the "GET!" "OUT!" bits punctuate the chorus) that the road to appreciation doesn't necessarily stop over in identification. At the very least, they've got the kind of throttling grasp on pop-song melody that gives me substantially more hope for their looming career than, say, Duels or the Delights or the New Shapes or or or; this sounds like a band with a "Take Me Out" waiting to happen in them somewhere. And anyway, fuck it, it's not like I wasn't walking around singing "Sex Farm" after I saw Spinal Tap - I kinda thought that was the point. (Click here to buy the "Recover" single from Amazon.co.uk)
Except for that then there's "New Feeling", taken from 2004's reissue/CD debut of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads live masterpiece. Like I said, I haven't downloaded any of the studio album reissues, but even if I'd been listening to them since the day they hit the net I still doubt I'd have anything better than "New Feeling" to post as far as selling y'all on the idea of spending money on records you already own. It's very possible that I've never gotten so much from a remaster as I have from The Name of This Band; at the very least, it's certainly the site of the remaster most responsible for making me reconsider what I like about a band, which is probably not too shabby when you consider that, to paraphase Chuck Klosterman, all remasters ever do is just make stuff louder.
Thing is, they really made the right stuff louder. The Name of This Band, in addition to being a very great CD in its own right and one of my very favorite albums of 2004, is also one of those listening experiences that stayed with me in a way that seems important; I can still remember driving back from Collateral and hearing this song (disc one, track one) for the first time and thinking "Okay, cool, I definitely haven't wasted my money this time". AND THEN CAME THAT GUITAR SOLO - that telegraph-line shook-one indie-disco jangleblast hammering on my neurotransmitters in a way that none of their other stuff - not even Remain In Light - ever managed to do. And then I remembered that that was also a lie, and that this song (and most of the subsequent ones) was rubbing my mind's genitals pretty much exactly like Stop Making Sense, an album I snuck out of my parents' CD racks when I was in the eighth grade and still have to this day, primarily because I can't think of many better examples of a band sounding like they're having a good time on stage committed to record (to this day, I still prefer the Stop Making Sense version of "Life During Wartime", mostly on the basis of its efforts to sound as much like a Cameo song as possible). And then I started wondering if I was overrating The Name of This Band in my head already, given how no matter how much fun this stuff was, this was still the same band that came up with the aforementioned Remain In Light, and hey whaddyaknow all of a sudden I was right there thinking about the Talking Heads again. Mission accomplished, I guess; maybe we should be on the lookout for David Byrne landing on a flightdeck somewhere.
The Talking Heads are a great band, and to be certain they came up with both very great songs and very great albums, but even back when I was ranting and raving to all my less-than-fever-pitched friends about the virtues of Remain In Light or Speaking In Tongues or, fuck, even just "Heaven", I never actually felt any ownership over the music; I might as well have been describing a particularly cool museum exhibit. But The Name of This Band, on the other hand, turned me into an evangelist; I still put "New Feeling" on people's mix CDs as recently as last night, mostly because right now in the Oh Six, even after the song's been around for twenty years, it's still transparently obvious which bits are the fun bits. Needless to say, I'm more than a little excited at the prospect of a release of Remain In Light engineered to sound good in the right-now. Men's heads have spontaneously exploded when confronted with less. (Click here to buy The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads from Amazon)
The Automatic, "Recover" - I doubt very much that the Automatic would appreciate me telling the world that the very first thought their song triggered in me was "What, is Christopher Guest making a movie about all these nu-wave bands now?", but I'm'a do it anyway. I actually don't even totally mean it as anything critical, to be honest; I mean, yeah I doubt that these guys are going to be pushing this single on their kids after they turn forty (your frame of reference for this should be the Editors), but it's just as worthwhile to point out that this is a nigh-unto impeccable slab of tunesmanship regardless of whether or not it mortifies You The Listener. Unsurprisingly, it's as much a studio creation as a musical one; the song is an orgy of double-tracking and sizzling hi-hats courtesy of Ian Broudie, and if there's a dancefloor on this earth where this kind of pop music actually plays I bet this song just fucking kills. But I don't want to make it sound like the Automatic themselves were just accomplices at the birth of their first kid; I may not necessarily buy into the sincerity behind the vocals, for instance, but "Recover" is one of those songs packed with so many slick little touches (most notably the way the "GET!" "OUT!" bits punctuate the chorus) that the road to appreciation doesn't necessarily stop over in identification. At the very least, they've got the kind of throttling grasp on pop-song melody that gives me substantially more hope for their looming career than, say, Duels or the Delights or the New Shapes or or or; this sounds like a band with a "Take Me Out" waiting to happen in them somewhere. And anyway, fuck it, it's not like I wasn't walking around singing "Sex Farm" after I saw Spinal Tap - I kinda thought that was the point. (Click here to buy the "Recover" single from Amazon.co.uk)
posted by James at 4:33 PM
![[Valid Atom 1.0]](valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
1 Comments:
Great job on The Heads.
My fave Talking Heads song to put on a mix tape is "Building On Fire." The horn line in that song is to die for. But the part that made me put it on mix tapes for girls when I could still use the mix tape as a way to try and touch a tampon was the part that went "we go tweetweeetweeetweeet like little birds."
Post a Comment
<< Home