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David Byrne & St. Vincent: Love This Giant

4AD

While it’s only a matter of time before somebody drops a Talking Heads medley on Glee, it’s probably no longer necessary to lay out David Byrne’s stake in the history of popular music. The latest way Byrne has found to consolidate his role as the unofficial godfather of modern American art-pop and polymaths everywhere is a series of high profile collaborations with old pals (Brian Eno, Caetano Veloso) and new chums (including an opera/concept album about Imelda Marcos with Fatboy Slim). The latest is a brilliantly widescreen full-length with St. Vincent, the 29-year-old indie sensation, born Annie Clark.

It’s a full creative partnership between Byrne and Clark—the droll electronics and soaring drama of a piece with both Byrne’s ongoing work and Clark’s much-loved trio of albums. With its sophisticated sunburst horns (“I Should Watch TV,” “The Forest Awakes”) and layered electro-skitters (“Weekend in the Dust”), in some ways, it’s the noisiest thing that Byrne has recorded since 1980’s Remain In Light. In other ways, Love This Giant comes fully insulated in modern indie-gauze. What effects might have once sounded shrill and thrilling (tumbling horns, crashing guitars) are now tempered colors in the common palette—a perfect sonic demonstration of the absorption of art-punk into America’s spongy fabric.

Love This Giant is music made for the new American concert hall rather than a soundtrack for delightedly looting it. But that’s the point. With big choruses like the gloriously Byrnsian “cool water” refrain of “Lazarus,” Love This Giant’s effortlessly palatable experimentation is simultaneously an argument that punk’s mass cultural insurrection hasn’t ended, but rather a permanent radicalism built into the firmament. “It’s not like I expected it would be,” Byrne sang on “The Revolution” on 2001’s Look into the Eyeball.

In fact, it’s quite lovely—Byrne’s voice graduating to a melodiousness that is almost the complete opposite of the precise Asperger’s stutter he inhabited on early Talking Heads records. “I can’t help thinking this is war,” Clark sings with acrobatic authority on the mostly Byrne-less “Lightning,” which like much of the album, could be performed in a cabaret. Love This Giant takes the form of traditional pop shelter, more post-modern suburban manse than artist’s loft and—when the Glee moment inevitably comes—a weird and welcoming shelter in the world to come.