David Byrne - Grown Backwards

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• David Byrne - Grown Backwards Brazil Import

Free Music Notes for Grown Backwards

Free Music Review: Mature Grown-Up Byrne and OPERA!
Hit: 5 Stars

It's a rich, satisfying musical journey encompassing dozens of influences and letting David stretch a little further. It's not a flawless record. Some of the songs fit so well together because there is a little too much restraint and lack of off the wall goofiness on this album. I think the reason for that has something to do with the very serious undertones a few songs carry with them. It's the 911 effect. You hear it in a couple of his songs. Things are a bit more somber now and even when they get a little silly, they recover quickly and sober right back up. It keeps David from self-consciously over-performing and at this point in his career that is a very good thing. In fact he is probably vocally at his peak on this album. I think LOOK INTO THE EYEBALL is still an album that is going to be easier to like and embrace if you are just returning to David Byrne land, but for those of us already here and under his spell, this album is a feast and I like it better today than I did yesterday.

Best cuts include: `The Man Who Loved Beer ` which was written by Donald Charles Book and Kurt Wagner and was apparently inspired by an ancient middle eastern poem which translates into "Debate Between a Man Tired of Life and his Soul"

Byrnes' music is unique. There are hooks and beats you can dance to in many of his songs, but they are not repetitious and change quickly morphing from a driving beat into an arrangement of strings you might hear in a piece of classical music and then right back into driving percussive beats. There are airy moments of chamber music, mixed with laid back percussive beats that would be at home in salsa music. There are shifts in harmonics that delight and sometimes evoke a musician getting high on his own music inventiveness and drunkenly celebrating with music incapable of walking a straight line. Bravo, who needs straight lines?

Which brings us to David Byrne doing opera. Rufus Wainwright to present AU FOND DU TEMPLE SAINT co-features Rufus Wainright on vocals and lots of strings. It's in French.

The song is originally from Act 1 of the opera The Pearl Fishers. It is about seasonal pearl fisherman in Ceylon. Zurga has just been chosen the leader of the fisherman workers. While they wait for the arrival of consecrated virgins whose prayers will keep the weather calm and free from the storms, Zurga's childhood friend, the hunter Nadir, returns after a long absence. Zurga and Nadir remember the night when they saw a beautiful woman that captured both their hearts. Their love for this woman could have driven the men apart but the swore they would forget her. That is what the song Au Fond du Temple Saint is about. Makes perfect sense now that Byrne has on it his album right? It's intriguing.

Tiny Apocalypse immediately sounds like an Eno era Talking Heads song, but of course it changes as it progresses.

She Only Sleeps rests on quiet finger-snaps and settles into a modified light calypso beat but of course has a few change ups. The song is what you call a Byrne ditty boasting the quintessential Byrne sense of humor.

The Other Side of Life is the kind of ironic song that few are able to pull off. It starts off sounding like something that might have been on the Beatle's White Album and winds up being a show tune in search of a Sondheim show to find a home in. Listen for those fabulous kitchen utensil percussions.

It's a great lead into the hallucinatory lyrics of PIRATES features hallucinatory lyrics and seems to be about someone who has trouble sleeping and is in between a dream and awake state.

Civilization sounds like a slow French flavored Talking Head Song. It has the wonderful line: "Civilization, its all about knives and forks."

`Astronaut' has Byrne coming up with interesting lyrics to talk-sing around the theramin that plays throughout the song. It almost works.

Track 13 is almost a throw-away song with overly positive Doris Day lyrics such as "I'm glad I've got skin, I'm glad I've got eyes/ I'm glad I got hips, I'm glad I've got thighs/ I'm glad I'm allowed to say the things I feel."
Track 14 is Un di Felice Etera a song from the Opera La Traviata written by Giuseppe Verdi. The opera was first performed at La Fenice in Venice in 1853 and is a classic of the opera-stage and even casual fans of opera can practically sing along with the music. Byrne sings what in the opera is a lovely duet between Violetta and Alfredo in the first act of the opera as a solo song declaration of love and admiration. It's a passionate romantic song even if you don't understand the Italian lyrics.

As a bonus track, Byrne includes a 9 minute and 35 second version of Lazy. Thank you. Thank you. Lazy is David's 2002 collaboration with the DJ group X Press 2 and was a hit in the UK and briefly hit number 1 on the US dance charts but most haven't heard it before. The song is what you might expect Talking Heads to release if they every re-united with a framework of classical music around the song. It's got over 7 minutes of energy wrapped between classic string intros and outro's. It reminds me of a cross between Curtis Mayfield and the Tom Tom Club. If you need another Life During Wartime from Byrne this at least comes close.

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