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Talking Heads
Fear of Music
(Sire/Rhino)
First Appeared in The Music Box, March 2006, Volume 13, #3
Written by John Metzger
In hindsight, the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music can be viewed as a
transitional affair that bridged the gap dividing the distinctive, new
wave-meets-R&B jitters of Talking Heads: 77 and More Songs about
Buildings and Food from the funk-laced fury of Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues. It also happens to be the band’s most daunting and
difficult album to embrace. The effort began invitingly with I Zimbra,
the ensemble’s early foray into Afro-Cuban polyrhythmic textures, though it
quickly turned foreboding as an ominous chant infiltrated the fray. Scattered
elsewhere were a few other highly accessible moments, such as the surreal
serenity of Heaven or the strikingly conventional, punk-funk structure of
Life During Wartime. The bulk of the collection, however, was fueled by
the uncomfortable, quivering tension between its repetitive dance beats and
David Byrne’s overly anxious vocals.
From its paranoia-filled lyrics to its tightly-wound arrangements, the aptly
titled Fear of Music perfectly captured the sound of a complete
psychological breakdown. The songs themselves were given innocuously simplistic
titles befitting an inmate at a psychiatric ward. In fact, seven of the 11
tracks were graced with only a single-word moniker — Mind, Paper,
and Drugs, among them. At first, the effect masked, and then it enhanced,
the terrifying substance of Byrne’s apprehensive ruminations, which expressed
his beliefs that animals were laughing at him, his electric guitar wasn’t to be
trusted, and the air itself was causing him harm.
In illustrating Byrne’s twitchy psychoses, the Talking Heads rekindled its
relationship with producer Brian Eno, and unlike More Songs about Buildings
and Food, this time, the partnership was more even-handed. In particular,
Eno’s eerily ambient influence is felt deeply on the nervous dissonance of
Memories Can’t Wait as well as on the unsettling distortion of Drugs,
though nearly everything — from the mechanical beat of Mind to the manic
urgency of Life During Wartime to the harried Cities — bore his
mark. Still, it was the Talking Heads’ frenetic energy that kept the material
aloft.
Despite the array of aural effects that filtered through Fear of Music,
however, its incarnation as a 5.1 surround sound DUALDISC isn’t nearly as
enveloping of the listener as one might expect it to be. Part of the problem is
that remixing the effort proved to be fraught with difficulties because it
originally was recorded with a remote truck at the loft in which Chris Frantz
and Tina Weymouth resided. The band’s lo-fi approach meant that the new version
of the outing was destined to contain less dimensionality and depth than it
otherwise might have, but the end result is that its subdued, but no less
stellar, sonic spectrum augments the sensation of constrained claustrophobia
that pervades endeavor. The CD side also contains alternate versions of Mind,
Cities, and Life During Wartime as well as an unfinished, David
Bowie-esque outtake titled Dancing for Money, while the DVD side features
performances of Cities and I Zimbra that were taken from a 1980
installment of the German television show Rockpop. Undoubtedly, all of
the extras, while enlightening, are geared towards avid collectors rather than
casual fans, but this is wholly appropriate for an album that is as intensely
challenging as Fear of Music. 
Fear of Music [DUALDISC] is available from Amazon.com.
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The DualDisc is no longer available in Canada.
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Fear of Music [Original Issue] is available from Amazon.com.
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For Canadian orders, please
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Brick [Box Set] is available from Amazon.com.
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2006
The Music Box
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