David Byrne and Brian Eno
(self-released)
Rather than think of this Byrne/Eno recording as extension of their now-thirty-year collaborative relationship, find it in your heart to consider the duo anew. It's not Eno's chilled country-funk production of Byrne's chicken-headed 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food, 1979's Fear of Music and 1980's Remain in Light (Talking Heads) or the music the twosome did as one as 1981's clucking collage My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is a more fluidly atmospheric, gospel-filled brand of art pop that borrows from the Heads' languid non-Eno recordings as well as Eno's own Roxy Music days (Roxy's Phil Manzanera is on Everything) and his latter ‘70s recordings like Another Green World. While Byrne acts as an almost-straight talking Garrison Keillor-sort with a winsome tone applied to his dreamy-yet-direct narratives, Eno provides a couch-bed of tuneful gloom and dearly relaxed atmospheres through which his players strum, thrum and pluck.
There are Bush-of-Ghosts-II moments like "Poor Boy" with its terrorist lyrical overtones. But from the panic-y lyrics and strummed-hard gospel of "Home" and the oozing Muzak-ic "Everything That Happens," to the lazy country-ish "My Big Nurse" and the dreamy discoid "Strange Overtones", this is oblong art pop at its holiest. By the time "The River" hits and the boys go rapturous with churchy harmonies, Byrne yelps out something truly hopeful for America beyond the Obama rhetoric: "A change is gonna come/ Like Sam Cooke sang in '63."
That'd be nice.
Standout Tracks: "Strange Overtones," "The River" A.D. AMOROSI
[Editor's Note: The album is available digitally now; pre-orders are currently being taken for the CD edition as well as a deluxe (and expensive) version loaded with bonus goodies, and both should be available in November.]
