Talking Heads – Fear Of Music

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Recorded at various locations across areas of New York City, the music found here on the band’s third studio album, and was filled with unconventional ideas that were counterbalanced by an equal number of unconventional rhythms and narratives that blend together to create an odd jittery atmospheric tension with the use of a broader more expansive sonically driven sound.

David Byrne once described picturing the characters in his songs as living in a dystopian world, and wrote his lyrics from that detached nearly anthropological perspective. Merely considering the song “Air,” where the notions of not trusting even the air, raising implications that even breathing can hurt, an obvious reference to the things we take most for granted as being worthy of paranoia, and “Paper” laced with reverb, where Byrne compares love to a sheet of paper, or the iconic catchy “Life During Wartime,” with it’s graphic novel, in a comic book format, regarding some sort of urban survivalists waiting on guns while be sustained merely on peanut butter. Of course this all makes the album seem rather dark and foreboding, and while at times it is, the song “Heaven” stands as a singular point of light with its shivering brilliant intoxicating arrangement, though at its core, even though beautiful, heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. It is worth noting here that some have referenced heaven to one of the most wonderful drugs of all time, Quaaludes, where once taken, the feels so good, so at peace, so raptured in an emotional emotional blanket bliss, yet while under that influence, nothing ever happens.

Depending on who you talk to, this album is either brilliant of a failure, and while hailed as stunning today, barely broke the top 100 album charts. I will say that Fear Of Music does have it spectacular moments, along with an equal amount of just as forgettable moments … though as with all Talking Heads’ albums, their relevance and importance, seems to increase over time, as if we must live though all we’re presented with here before we can fully understand or comprehend it. Nevertheless, the albums stands as a fixture from an end of a decade, deeply routed in those times, yet not so much that it can not be enjoyed, or sound as prophetic today.

*** The Fun Facts: With its black corrugated packaging, which resembles a manhole cover, the album is foreboding, inescapably urban and obsessed with texture. Partly recording the album at Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth's loft in Long Island City, New York, next door to Tina's brother Yann, an architect who used a type of black vinyl flooring in many of his designs. “It’s kind of a ubiquitous pattern,” says Harrison, who studied architecture at Harvard. “You never noticed it until it was brought out of that utilitarian image by being an album cover.” Harrison initially wanted to use black vinyl for the LP cover, but the material couldn't be made thin enough without cracking. Instead, Fear of Music came with an embossed cardboard cover.

Review by Jenell Kesler