Talking Heads- Classic or Dud?

nothing on stop making sense is from little creatures.

I'll take the Feelies over the Talking Heads anyday. Better nerd rock.

I believe you are thinking of

...thinking of Speaking In Tongues

No songs from Little Creatures are on SMS.

My favourite TH album is 'The Name of this Band is...." Holy jack-in-a-box, Adrian Belew ****ing rules, especially on "Born Under Punches", which I've only listened to about.... 38 times? I love that song.

well, it would make sense you liking 'SMS' and 'SIT' above the other eno-era material. of the three eno albums i'd rate 'em: 'fear' best, then 'more songs', then 'remain'.

Yes, really really good stuff. For me the jury's still out on Belew - I much prefer the twin Fenders of Byrne and Harrison on the earliest stuff. The playing on New Feeling and especially A Clean Break is terrific - crisp and sparkling. I'd love to know on which trax (studio and live) Byrne uses a Jaguar. NF and ACB sound like a Strat/Tele combination to me.

Life During Wartime
Swamp
Once In A Lifetime
Crosseyed And Painless
Psycho Killer

I thought you said "emo-era" instead of "Eno-era", and I was, like, "WTF?" Me and my stupid eyesight.

http://www.discogs.com/release/157172
http://www.discogs.com/release/424908

Although Remain in Light's probably my favourite Talking Heads album I really like Johnny Marr's guitar on Nothing but Flowers from Naked, I think that's a great pop song. Classic.

Lifetime Piling Up is my favourite Talking Heads song. Anyone know why it didn't make it onto any of their albums?

They had other things to do.

"Naked" is actually an amazing album. I will fite u ifn u say no.

also i heard luke slater play a dance version of i zimbra - what is this called?

it's probably the Peter Black remix.

http://www.vinylrecords.ca/talking-heads-zimbra-peter-blackjezebel-spirit-p-60.html

lifetime piling up was made after naked, I believe. I agree that it's one of their best songs, along with sax and violins. I kind of feel like if they'd managed another album it could have been completely classic, based off just those two tracks. anyway I guess these songs AREN'T bonuses on any of the reissues which is a bad oversight and makes the 'sand in the vasoline' collection absolutely necessary.

are there enough hip hop and house songs that have sampled TH to warrant their own thread?

xpost Weirdly enough -- assuming that the 2005 Brick box set contains the same reissues you're talking about, and I think it does -- "Sax and Violins" is there as an extra on the Naked disc, but "Lifetime Piling Up" is not. Though it is on the Once In A Lifetime multi-disc compilation from 2003. The catalogue is a mess of reissues.

Yeah, "Sax & Violins" is on my copy of the Naked reissue. Has there really been a mess of reissues? Comps, sure.

I think the non-album singles from 1977 that are collected on Sand in the Vaseline are pretty essential.

are there enough hip hop and house songs that have sampled TH to warrant their own thread?

KC Flyte - Planet E

Old question - Who are the nineties/noughties TH?

I do agree with Dismemberment Plan and Radiohead. Would have to think about others. Going back to their own era, Talking Heads were a big influence on King Crimson for their Discipline (1981), Beat (1982) and Three Of A Perfect Pair (1984) albums.

Martha & The Muffins sort of paralleled the TH Eno trilogy with their work with Daniel Lanois on This Is The Ice Age (1981), Danseparc (1982) and Mystery Walk (1984). The first is available, and Danseparc will be reissued on August 4 in the UK.

I think the non-album singles from 1977 that are collected on Sand in the Vaseline are pretty essential.

Totally. "Sugar On My Tongue," "I Want To Live," "Gangster of Love," "Popsicle" – all great.

Also, "I Wish You Wouldn't Say That". "No Compassion" from the album '77 is another fave of mine.

I finally read Tom's article several years late - http://freakytrigger.co.uk/old-ft/essays/2001/02/africa/

Here's a comment I posted:

You likely know this by now, but My Life... was actually recorded before Remain In Light. It makes more sense as a sort of warm up to their masterpiece rather than a follow-up. The band supposedly wrote "The Overload" as their concept of what Joy Division might sound like, having not yet actually heard them. "Listening Wind" is by no distance the worst track. It's freaking eerie and haunting, and just another strong track in a nearly flawless masterpiece.

Wanna define...so say so, so say so
Divine to define, she is moving to define, so say so, so say so
Night must fall now-darker, darker.
She...has got to move the world...to move the world...to move
The world

so so great

listening wind is one of my favorite songs on that album

I think the Dismemberment Plan turned out not to be like Talking Heads at all... I don't know if they sounded so great at the time because I was younger or because so much shit has come out since then. The D-plan's legacy has turned out to be a, well... dumb one. The bands who picked up on a lot of their references ended up dumbing down indie rock instead of running with it in new directions (like RiL's influence on electronic music) or acting as a hipster reference for pop musicians.

I'm listening to "Sax & Violins" right now for the first time in a while -- what a great song! The melody is really very well written and honestly beautiful. When I was a much bigger TH fan (see upthread, haha!) I was really impressed by the Philip Larkin reference, partly because I was also geeked out on a lot of academic poetry at the time... I'm surprised to say I still think it's pretty well done! Not a lot of songwriters could pull that off. There will probably never be another Talking Heads, oh oh oh....

the ping is only on the streaming version though, not the CD, and it depends on the stereo you have

#onethread

finally getting around to the Chris Frantz book and today i learned that the sonar-ping sounds on "take me to the river", which ive spent 30 years assuming were an Eno keyboard sound, are actually Frantz hitting some kind of woodblock w/reverb.

My friend and I like to talk about this late '70s/early '80s era of art-rock where it's sometimes impossible to tell the synths from the real instruments. Like, Peter Gabriel albums, sometimes it's a synth, sometimes it's a guitar, sometimes it's Gabriel yelling into a mic through a synth, etc.

Yep, like the outro to "Once in a Lifetime" has like these insanely distorted warbles that probably started life as humble organ parts

Yeah, I always thought they were distorted guitar power cords, but I'm pretty sure they're just overdriven organ.

and sometimes the synth yelled at Gabriel

the synth yelled at Gabriel

Sequel to "The Boy Looked at Johnny"?

Lol

Franz book ended up being a letdown imho, but did offer some interesting tidbits I'd never heard before about ideas for Talking Heads projects that Frantz liked but which never materialized - thankfully, bc they largely sound terrible.

One is that apparently the idea of having Phil Spector(!) produce the third Talking Heads LP got as far as the meeting stage - and no farther, after Spector predictably acted like a lunatic at the first meeting. Would he have added a children's choir to "Heaven"? Sadly we'll never know.

Another scuppered idea which Frantz still seems steamed about is that apparently he was approached by Ken Kesey in the early 80s about Talking Heads doing an opera based on Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha"...? Frantz loved the idea but apparently it was nixed by the bad ogre David Byrne, and we have the Stop Making Sense movie instead. The mind reels at the alternate-universe possibilities...

i wonder if he felt like that would compete with his catherine wheel stuff from the same period?

i can imagine how the hassles byrne was getting about appropriation & imperialism in the early 80s might dissuade him from taking on that particular subject matter at that moment in time

The new Spider-Man opens with "I Zimbra" playing over the opening credits, which I wasn't expecting

UH SPOILERS???

jk jk im not gonna watch that for a few years probably

You forgot to add #onethread there.

Dadaist poetry finally makes it to the mainstream.

you may ask yourself

where is that radioactive spider

About the talking heads 5.1 downmixes that were going around a few years ago (and which are fucking fantastic)… does everyone else’s file of the first track on Naked have a jarring glitch on the very first brass note? Been trying to live with it but it really bugs me!

Yes! I made a fix, lemme see if I can dig it out.

Oh yay yes please! Lol i knew it would be you who’d respond

Hah! Here 'tis - https://www.fromsmash.com/V~DKjP.~u7-bt
 

Listening now, thanks a lot MN!

No worries!