this perspective makes Byrne's songs fascinating. But what makes Talking Heads my favorite and probably the best rock band anywhere is that they've invented an audio analog to their view from the brink: rock music that warps and suspends time.
They use a simple device: repetition. Unswerving rhythms, immobile harmonies. Each tune is a chain of sections linked by rhythm, each section a matrix of interlocking riffs. "I Zimbra" stakes Talking Heads' claim to pure mechanization. One by one, the instruments click into place in a rhythm pattern fleshed out by Afro-futurist harmonies and topped by the meaningless chanted syllables of a poem by Twenties Dadaist Hugo Ball. At composition's end, Robert Fripp's guitar phases through the whole pulsing assemblage like the shuttle of a high-speed loom.
Even in the more conventional numbers—those built on ordinary major and minor chords — anything repeatable gets repeated. "Heaven," Byrne sings in his minimalist anthem of the same name, "is a place where nothing happens," and while his songs aren't by any means completely static, their harmonies don't move as fast as most pop progressions do. When a tune lingers on one chord, riffs that go with that chord are played over and over. As for rhythm, drummer Chris Frantz will sometimes hold one lick for an entire cut: for example, the steady hi-hat eighth notes he plays throughout "Mind" and "Heaven." It's deliberately mechanical, but because the riffs are complexly intertwined and there's a solid backbeat, the repetition doesn't inspire Kraftwerk-style boredom or disco claustrophobia. Instead, there's a sense of time being held at bay.
Yet Byrne's vocals keep the music in the present tense. He sings like a Mouseketeer trapped in an endless anything-can-happen day: rattled, wide-eyed, quavery, breaking into glossolalia whenever he runs out of words. Sometimes he slides into sync with the other members of the band, sometimes he dithers above them in lunatic abandon. Though his cohorts play like an efficient machine, David Byrne maintains the beauty of human error.
Last year's More Songs about Buildings and Food signaled that the group, on its second album, had perfected its tech-mech music. The LP was a manic, oddly funky, hard-edged, catchy masterpiece. On Fear of Music, Talking Heads take that style and proceed to torture-test it under every distortion they and co-produ
