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David Byrne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
(self-released, 2008)
5 out of 10
As multi-disciplinary artists, David Byrne and Brian Eno have positively affected my life in a vast number of ways. That's why I find it tempting to be too kind to this record. That's why I'm reluctant to say that I ... (gulp) ... cannot stand to hear the first three songs again. That's why the process of continuing to listen to the songs I do enjoy has not been coming very naturally to me. I must confront the fact that not only is Eno's work here only slightly more remarkable than that of his work with Coldplay and recent U2, but also, and far more importantly to me (because I don't really expect all that much from Eno these days), this is the closest thing to a song-album clunker David Byrne's been responsible for in a couple decades, minus change (Uh-Oh).
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, their first LP-length collaboration as a duo from 1981, was credited to Brian Eno and David Byrne. The remarriage switches the billing; unlike the spooky, skeletal funk soundtrack of My Life, this new project is an album for Byrne to sing his lyrics over Eno's tracks. Here, Byrne demonstrates a strong singing voice and a generally good set of lyrics, all in the service of Eno's mostly-bland, half-appealing tracks. No matter how smart and present Eno has been or may be in regards to the culture and the world stage, no matter to any relevance he may have to the avant-garde in any genre, or any experimentation or even significant exploration in which he may still indulge, none of these things are evident on this recording. I'm not surprised. In fact, am I preaching to the choir? Does anyone still think about him the way one used to? Do we all know by now that the majority of his work is high surface-quality in the service of mediocrity?
Among the eleven tracks of Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, there is a four-song run that works, starting with the secular country-gospel ballad "Everything That Happens" at the crucial, uh, track-four position. It's grown to become my favorite track on the record; the composition is about as simple as possible without being cloying, allowing the ambience and Byrne's sideways-soul to get to me. Byrne's self-stacked choir at the end is the album's finest and most stirring moment, singing in the rich and plain terms he's made his trademark: "Everything that happens will happen today/ And nothing has changed, but nothing's the same/ And every tomorrow will be yesterday."
"Life Is Long" is a dry, horn-thick slab of new-old R&B, and though it's the trendiest track aesthetically, it's the best arrangement; Eno's keyboard hook, riding into the fadeout, is the instrumental highlight of the album. "The River" is an odd dip into a lush Brian Wilson-styled arrangement without a verse-chorus structure, admittedly an unexpected moment from the Eno of today — more like something John Cale would have done around when Eno hung/hovered with him. The run concludes with "Strange Overtones," a slick neo-white groove that has surprisingly remained winning enough to stand to repeat listens, probably because of that tasteful tone that makes some of those U2 songs sound good too. Byrne's lyrics here seem to be about that topic he has addressed in more than one fashion as an artist: the inexplicable effect of music on emotions. More of that "sideways-soul."
These four are the only songs I find myself ever wanting to hear from this album. Without asking for a different set of songs (who knows how many more they had or how good they'd have been), I'm almost grateful to Byrne/Eno for structuring the piece with the three songs I dislike the most at the beginning. The tail of Everything That Happens is more worthy to be left on in the background; the material gets weaker but not unpleasant, and at least the record ends with a pretty song called "The Lighthouse," reminiscent of Robert Fripp's lower-key songs with Byrne again returning to a hymn-like approach, albeit without the same stir. "Home," however, introduces the album on a deeply grating note; Byrne's chorus awkwardly references "Homeward Bound" by Simon & Garfunkel as the folk-strummy adult-contemporary background brings out the worst in him all around. I have only gotten through all five minutes of it once. "My Big Nurse" only barely lightens up on the sap, and "I Feel My Stuff," as promisingly eerie and relatively "dark" as parts of the arrangement are, does not ultimately deliver on anything but being too silly and too long.
I really can summon up only a post-script after delving into such minutiae regarding something as disheartening as the framing of this album. Byrne is bringing "Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno" on a world tour. Here's hoping for a live arrangement that enriches rather than replicates the sound, as well as some inspiring takes on their longer-and-better-aged works from the past.
-Spencer Owen
So I've been working on an album since April, intermittently. It'll be the second album I've made this year, and both albums are unique in that they feature the co-production and engineering assistance of close friends of mine. My artistic solitude has become far less all-encompassing, if that's at all a good way to put it. The one I finished two months ago (I think) was called iTunes Changed My Life, and for various reasons (well, how about "every song is based on an illegal sample") I didn't really spread it around. My longtime brotha Morgan Klein was the criminal partner in that endeavor and we completed it (started and finished it! really!) in two days. He was a phenomenal collaborator and I'm extremely proud of those results. It was made, however, with the full awareness that I was looking for an outlet, something to get my desires for instant gratification and the art of spontaneity met.
The next album is called The Light Touch, and not to sound big, or too big, it represents me, now, completely. A young woman named Theresa Rife, with whom I've had the irregrettable pleasure of becoming great friends well over the last year in particular, has been my studio engineer and co-producer on this project. I couldn't be more grateful for the time, skills, thoughts and ears she has contributed (and continues to contribute) to the process. As for the music, so many of my influences and loves -- Laurie Anderson, Steely Dan, Woody Allen, Jacques Rivette, Jim O'Rourke, Vince Guaraldi -- are poured into this record's mold and the resulting bastard sculpture is the work I'm proudest to have sired in all my 24+ years.
I wrote, arranged and performed all of it myself, as usual. For no particular reason other than that it lends some sort of "news"-like quality to this journal entry, here's the tracklist:
1. Jeu des Treize (for Out 1); 2. One Night; 3. Heavy, Heavy Hand (for Manhattan); 4. Alex in the Shower (for Paranoid Park); 5. Biker with a Deathwish; 6. Highway 17 Revisited (for Grapefruit); 7. The Light Touch*
Running at just about 40 minutes, that's the album. I don't know how it's gonna get heard, although I'll probably spread it around for free to a bunch of people and then at the very least make a CD. It's not a vinyl piece; it doesn't handily split into two. It runs straight through. Don't stop. In any case, I hope to have it completed by the end of the month. Dedicated to the east Bay.
Comments
wow, that sounds pretty ill. congrats on having an outlet & some support. good luck in the ongoing process of expression
Can't wait to hear the results...always love to know what goes on in the brain of yours.
Sparks - Exotic Creatures of the Deep
(Lil Beethoven, 2008)
8 out of 10 (update: see below)
Joke refrains repeated to death by a flamboyant, falsetto-flaunting singer (Russell Mael) with harmony stacks bigger than Freddie Mercury's. Songs based on novelty-style concepts. Unrealistic, programmed synthetic string sections and piano patches (Ron Mael) standing in for the real thing, with occasional silly rock riffing and drums and even a track mostly cribbed from a Kylie Minogue strip-club groove. All from a pair of brothers that's still doggedly making music after roughly 40 years.
I'm serious when I say that the Maels' latest, Exotic Creatures of the Deep, took over my brain for a full work-week. To review this is to shine a spotlight on what Sparks have been doing out of said spotlight (at least in America) for several year now. Lil' Beethoven was the 2002 album that practically reinvented Sparks into what they are now. Every song on that record is an epic meditation on something I would never expect or even hope to meditate on, and yet by the time almost every song cycles past the third minute, I'm ready for the fourth and perhaps beyond. Some choice choruses: "I am the rhythm thief/ Say goodbye to the beat;" "I married myself/ I'm very happy together;" "How do I get to Carnegie hall?/ Practice, man, practice!!"...and from "My Baby's Taking Me Home," simply the titular line, repeated over...and over...
...and over. Good thing that all these crazy, seemingly bad ideas are put to the test by experts in the pop field; they feel revelatory and sound like nothing else (with the possible exception of a couple latter-day Residents tracks, and that's only in some of the arrangements). Hello Young Lovers, from 2006, was surprising mainly for its stubborn continued exploration of the exact same technique, four years later; another surprise, I must say, is how much better it was. (One song consists mostly of recitations of "The Star-Spangled Banner." I am not joking when I say this is kind of fantastic.) Third time being the charm, now there is Exotic Creatures of the Deep to make the best of this stunning approach yet.
The title is apropos, perhaps accidentally, in that these bizarre entities really had to sink in before becoming fully embedded into the skull. "The Director Never Yelled 'Cut'" is one peculiar creature that took a little time to really settle; it is a song about a director whose style of finding a good performance is to let the camera keep rolling until she sees something she likes. Metaphor? Probably not, but Russell's repetition of "the director never yelled 'cut,'" alternating with vastly harmonized "aahhh"s, makes the song into as much of an enigma as the director character's intentions. "Strange Animal" goes on like a "regular" jazzy pop tune until someone joins the song and then begins critiquing the song itself — or is he critiquing a different song we can't hear? Unclear — and the swinging syncopation of the hook, "What a strange animal we are," is set unchanged against a 2/4 rock beat for the remainder of the track.
There are nine other songs, and if you think it seems futile for me to have tried to describe two of them, imagine how I feel. When Sparks started, they were a somewhat more straightforward, bombastic glam-pop outfit; 1974's Kimono My House is a classic of smart silliness, attitude and melodies. Now it's the 2000s and they've almost completely sealed themselves off from any trends. They're completely alone, almost wrongly so — okay, so wrong it's way, way right. If I tried to go into more detail, you'd start to say, "I should hate these songs! Shouldn't I? Isn't this sub-TMBG kiddy nonsense?" Nope. It is not. If you have any inkling to trust me that this works, and that these guys are making the very, very strangest and some of the best pop music around, do listen. If you get the joke, or more appropriately, if you get past the joke (the false grandeur) into the real grandeur (the genius), it's hypnotic. Really. Sparks get gold.
-Spencer Owen
update: I've changed the grade but I'm too lazy to change the content of the review. Days after I published this review, I realized just how good their '06 release, Hello Young Lovers, really was. I'd give that one a 8.5 and this one an 8; I'm continuing to listen to it, and the rest of Sparks' catalogue, and I think it's the best album they've put out that I've yet heard. I've got a handful still to check out, but something tells me Whomp That Sucker isn't gonna vault into the top. I shall see.
Comments
That's the stuff, Spencer. One of my abso-fave bands of all-time. Loved their experiments with Glass-Reich-styled minimalism on Lil' Beethoven - and would venture to say that "My Baby's Taking Me Home" is one of their greatest - and loveliest - tracks ever. And there are soooo many to choose from...
Comments
Too bad. I had high hopes. I was digging Eno when those Roxy Music albums he's on came out and Byrne starting with Talking Heads '77. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was a revelation. Everything changes. Really.
Yeah, my hopes were kind of unreasonably high (well, at least unreasonable for Eno), and I think that disappointment's kinda palpable in the write-up...
An Interesting Note: