• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    An expanded audio album, out Sept. 15, now includes the entire concert set, with two tracks omitted from the movie: “Cities” and a medley of “Big Business” and “I Zimbra.” Refreshing its peak performance, the band hopes to draw one more generation of fans to its irresistible funk grooves and youthful ambitions.

    The music hot-wired rock, funk and African rhythms, while the fractured, non sequitur lyrics glanced at, among many other things, disinformation (“Crosseyed and Painless”), evangelicalism (“Once in a Lifetime”), authoritarianism (“Making Flippy Floppy”) and environmental disaster (“Burning Down the House”).

    There had been choreographed soul revues and big-stage concert spectacles long before Talking Heads mounted their 1983 tour supporting the album “Speaking in Tongues.” But Byrne envisioned something different: a performance influenced by the stylized gestures of Asian theater and the anti-naturalistic, avant-garde stage tableaus of Robert Wilson.

    Then, with everyone in place, the concert turned into a surreal dance party, capped by Byrne’s appearance in an oversized, squared-off, very floppy suit — an everyday American variation on the geometric costumes of Japanese Noh theater.

    The band enlisted the equally open-eared Brian Eno as a producer and collaborator to extend its sonic palette and songwriting strategies — which, in turn, led Talking Heads to add musicians onstage.

    The show didn’t have a choreographer; Byrne and the backup singers, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, had worked out some moves while dancing around his loft before the tour, while others emerged as it progressed.


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  • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Normally, I am not a fan of concert videos or film, prefer the studio albums from most bands.
    But this… this is something else. This and “Plays Live” from Peter Gabriel are the only large-venue concert films or albums that I love.

    The other type of live recording I love are bands playing live sessions for radio stations, or in small places like bars, where the acoustics sound intimate.
    Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel can fill large spaces with an essence that is different from the studio setting and can make it equally compelling. That is a rare gift indeed.