Because Talking Heads have spoiled us with the richness of their music for nine years, we have come to expect a bold advance with each new album. So what is it here? Gregorian disco? Or perhaps electro-shakuhachi, or Indo-punk? Actually, Little Creatures is a retreat from the avant-garde, a retreat that begins immediately in the cover art. On past albums the band wore its art-school training on its sleeve, devising experimental graphics for its LP Jackets. On the back of Little Creatures, though, they are dressed like privates in the Salvation Army, while on the front, Southern folk artist Howard Finster has scribbled a cartoonish profile of the band, showing head Head David
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Byrne in boots and BVDs, supporting a globe on his back. (It brings to mind a comment Pete Townshend made to
Relling Stone three years ago: "I like New York, but I don't see a hell of a lot happening. David Byrne has got the weight of the whole thing on his shoulders.") Inside the jacket Byrne and company present an album that tries to shrug off their weighty reputation. The songs are simple and clearly rooted in pop structures, and Byrne injects a feeling of lyrical giddiness that almost makes this sound like a different band.
The most obvious difference on Little Creatures is the skeletal music. The opening track, "And She Was," is a bouncy tune about levitation that wouldn't have been out of place on the band's debut album. After years of thick studio experimentation with echo and delay, it's startling to hear again Chris Frantz' stiff drumming stripped of ricocheting polyrhythms, and Byrne's clipped, ringing guitar riff polishes the bright chorus to a cleanness we thought they had discarded. There are no mountainous overdubs on the album, and when the Heads do add instrumentation beyond the basic quartet – steel guitar on "Creatures of Love," choral harmonies and Cajun accordion on "Road to Nowhere," bits of sax and percussion throughout – it's in a subtle way that prevents the songs from becoming genre exercises. The call-and-response bridge on "Television Man" recalls Tommy James more than Fela Kuti, indicating that the band has returned from its ethnomusicological voyage.
With the instrumentation pared to a crisp, basal role, the focus shifts back to Byrne's lyrics. They are mostly narrative, as opposed to the cut-up imagery he has recently favored, and anyone who was surprised by the mature warmth Chrissie Hynde showed on the Pretenders' Learning to Crawl will be amazed by what Byrne's lyrics suggest. On "The Big Country," some years ago, he observed the mundane details of domestic Americana and concluded, with fretful distaste, "I wouldn't live there if you paid me to." But Little Creatures is the sound of David Byrne falling in love with normalcy.
We were sort of warned. Ever since Fear of Music, Talking Heads have put their weirdest song at the end of each album. On Speaking in
