![]() My favorite is the 2000XL.It produces a very distinctive sound. The difference now, however, is that Byrne no longer assumes he needs one. For M, Scott chose MPC, reveling that he made most of my new album on an MPC. “We’re only tourists in this life,” he sings, “only tourists, but the view is nice.” The 28-year-old who wrote “Once in a Lifetime” may have fruitlessly asked himself, “How did I get here?” and his 65-year-old counterpart has grown no closer to finding an answer. ![]() A clear descendant of Talking Heads’ 1980 masterpiece “Remain in Light,” the song sees Byrne once again taking stock of his life as though witnessing it from a passive remove, but here the outlook has changed. Penultimate track “Everybody’s Coming to My House” captures perhaps the essence of his music - it’s an instantly infectious, insistently rhythmic song that nonetheless has enough of an edge to make you hesitate to actually dance to it. In contrast, “This Is That,” one of several collaborations with enigmatic composer Oneohtrix Point Never, is a treasure trove of sonic pleasures geared for close headphone listening, but the bones of the song beneath them never quite seem to connect.īut when Byrne’s themes and his compositions cohere, the results are wonderful to behold. “It’s Not Dark Up Here” starts promisingly but doesn’t add flesh to its loose framework. (“The brain is a soft-boiled potato” “the pope don’t mean s–t to a dog.”) There’s still plenty of room for darkness - the downtempo “Bullet” offers a stark, anatomical description of a bullet passing through a human body, and stands as perhaps the most politically relevant song on the record - but there’s enough hope and joy here to take Byrne at his word that the phrase “American Utopia” should be read without irony.Īt times, particularly during the more meditative middle stretch, the album can be easier to admire than to love. “Dog’s Mind” imagines a presidential inauguration as seen from a canine perspective, while “Every Day Is a Miracle” is full of oddball bons mots. American Utopia by David Byrne Nonesuch Release Date: Summary Critic Reviews User Reviews Details & Credits User Score 6. Rather than dwell on the horrors of the Trump era, he opts to take a more expansive view, frequently reaching for gardening metaphors and snatches of Seussian metaphysics. In Byrne’s work, anxiety always loves company.Yet the focus throughout is squarely on Byrne’s inimitable croon - at 65, his voice is remarkably pristine - and his often defiantly optimistic lyrics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an average score of 72 based on 32 reviews. Byrne’s American Utopia, his first solo album in 14 years, celebrates the spirit of rediscovery with an inviting sonic sheen and semi-political purpose.These songs don’t describe an. Yet it speaks to an artist who’s long made a career of transforming uneasiness into bliss. Often, in the spirit of Byrne’s inspiring Reasons to Be Cheerful website and lecture tour, these are inspiring, i.e., the deliciously slo-mo soca groove of “Every Day Is a Miracle.” For this writer, however, the most agitated parts are the most comforting. ![]() But the frantic segments generally recede too soon, supplanted by more less-anxious downtempo bits. There are ambient meditations as well as bracingly kinetic moments, like the electronic freakout in “Doing the Right Thing,” and the chorus outbursts on “I Dance Like This,” which conjure the datastorm of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the disorientation of Fear of Music‘s “Drugs.” Byrne delivers some impressively wicked guitar outbursts, too. The balance of light and dark is especially compelling on “Bullet,” a travelogue of just that (“His skin did part in two/Skin that women had touched”) and “Everybody’s Comin’ to My House,” a sort of agoraphobic’s kidnapping fantasy. ![]()
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