Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Q APRIL 2018 - by Tom Doyle

DAVID BYRNE: AMERICAN UTOPIA

Dream Team: Playful, Eno-assisted solo return from former Talking Head

For the past fourteen years, one-time Talking Heads frontman David Byrne has shied away from making his seventh solo album, instead preferring to involve himself in a series of collaborative records with such artists as Norman Cook and St. Vincent. The highpoint of this decade-plus buddying-up was Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, his 2008 album with Brian Eno, which, differing completely to their 1981 found sounds and radio voices-sampling masterpiece My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, served up a collection of dreamy-headed, groovesome songs.

Byrne returns to the tone of that record here, for what seems its sequel in all but name, with Eno co-writing or contributing to all of the tracks. The singer says this album's pointed title is more hopeful than sarcastic and there's no straightforward socio-political message across its ten tracks. Coming halfway through, Dog's Mind does, however, open with a despotic president dictating to an obedient press before humans are portrayed as daft, blissful mutts unaware of the bigger picture.

Where Byrne's lyrics in Talking Heads were oblique and funny peculiar, here he views life with gentle, surreal humour and mischief, imagining God as a rooster (with Jesus as an egg) amid the Latin beats and joyful chorus of Every Day Is A Miracle. Playing it straighter, there's real beauty in the reverie-inducing soundscapes of This Is That and Stop Making Sense-era good foot funk in Everybody's Coming To My House. It all amounts to his best record in years. His creative fires still showing no sign of dimming, David Byrne remains as playful and brilliant as ever.

Listen To: Every Day Is A Miracle / Everybody's Coming To My House