Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 20, 1994 TAG: 9407150019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEN TUCKER NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He had a kind of attitudinal gawkiness that was alternately goofily charming and eerily unsettling. Back in the late '70s, Byrne's blank face and intentional monotone frequently made him seem like a sensitive robot, and it was his ironic anomie that turned one of his creepiest songs, ``Psycho Killer,'' into one of Talking Heads' first big crowd pleasers.
Nothing in Byrne's early career was straightforward or, heaven forbid, personal. Assiduously avoiding self-revelation, he and his colleagues weren't being droll when they called their second album ``More Songs About Buildings and Food''; that was indeed pretty much what the songs were about.
But a decade and a half later, the most striking qualities he displays on his new solo album, ``David Byrne'' (Luaka Bop/Sire/Warner Brothers), are the directness of the emotions and the unironic warmth of the voice articulating them.
On this collection, it is a decidedly reformed psycho killer who proclaims sentiments like ``The pleasure of a kiss/It never fades away'' and croons gently to a woman, ``My love is you.''
Byrne has never sounded more earnest than on ``Sad Song,'' in which he solemnly avers, ``It's the truly sad people who get the most out of life.'' The luminous album embodies a paradox: joyous melancholy.
The lyrics that describe his most ebullient emotions are set to languid, even dolorous, melodies; on the other hand, he also makes buoyant music out of meditations on death, loneliness and the remembrance of romances past.
Bryne, 42, has built his work outside Talking Heads around experiments with genre and form. He has brought his white American art-student quirks to bear on black funk as well as world music with myriad African and Latin pop rhythms.
From ``My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,'' his 1981 collaboration with Brian Eno, to the pop exotica of 1989's ``Rei Momo,'' Byrne has never condescended to the cultures he was invading; instead, he made beguiling music by presenting himself as the appreciative tourist, a quizzical stranger with an ear for polyrhythms.
He has expanded his compositional range by writing movie soundtracks (``The Last Emperor'') and music for theater (``The Catherine Wheel''). In this sense, ``David Byrne'' is yet another experiment: Byrne's novel variation on the confessional conventions of singer-songwriter rock.
For a performer who in the past has taken pride in self-effacement, ``David Byrne'' teems with first-person pronouncements, some of them wistfully confiding (``I'm tired of goodbyes and funerals''), some just emptily clever (``I am just an advertisement for a version of myself'').
But for all the ostensible talk about himself, the lyrics convey less information than does the texture of Byrne's voice, which is frequently lower and more emotionally shaded than ever before.
He used to be one of those people who sang because he wrote the words and had a microphone in front of him; these days, he has become a wittily dexterous vocalist. Accompanied by unadorned rock-band backing, Byrne plays guitar in styles ranging from the folky acoustic strumming on ``My Love Is You'' to the grungy, medium-tempo raves-ups that climax ``Crash.''
Unfortunately, the weakest song on the album is also its first single: ``Angels,'' which, except for its spiffy way of describing sex (``Fruit of salty lubrication/Tangled up in arms and legs''), is nothing more than a shallow gloss on Talking Heads' deepest song, ``Once in a Lifetime.''
There's also an annoying aimlessness to ``A Self-Made Man,'' on which Byrne natters on about a bleak cyberpunk future in a flat tone that makes him sound uncannily, and unappealingly, like Lou Reed.
The finest music on ``David Byrne'' transcends its singer-songwriter concept and reverts to Talking Heads' best habit, that of using words as little more than sound while steadily intensifying the beat.
For example, ``Back in the Box'' is a fragmented monologue about nature's mercilessness, but it is the rhythm section, which includes a garbage can, that gives the song its surging power. And the catchy hook in ``Sad Song'' is nothing more eloquent than Byrne's lustily yelled repetition of the phrase ``La-da-da!''
In the past, he created musical drama by being a terribly self-conscious artist always struggling to loosen up; on ``David Byrne,'' the struggle is over, but the drama remains.
by CNB