Talking Heads
Talking Heads: 77 [Super Deluxe Edition]
SIRE/RHINO
The first album from Talking Heads isn’t merely skeletal in comparison to the rest of the CBGB-by-way-of-RISD quartet’s catalog—Talking Heads: 77 is downright X-ray-like. Within the grouchy, crunching first wave of NYC’s dusty punks, however, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and eventually Jerry Harrison (fresh from Jonathan Richman’s equally emaciated Modern Lovers) were cleanly complex, cooly motorik, and flush with twitchy, gulped emotionalism masquerading as nervous detachment. What other frowny-faced murder song features the dry-ice Mao-ism of “Psycho Killer”’s famous French refrain, “Fulfilling my hope, I launch myself towards glory / OK”?
Rhino’s four-LP (plus a slew of 7-inch singles) box set celebrating TH77 features a remastered version of the debut, demos and outtakes, a previously unreleased Live at CBGB disc, and requisite era-appropriate tchotchkes portrays Talking Heads’ debut in its gleaming twilight entirety—airless, neat, and cut to the marrow. While that fat-trimmed idea of Caucasoid art-school funk might not describe the gently swinging “First Week/Last Week… Carefree,” the steel pan–infested “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town,” the acoustic rarity of “Psycho Killer” with the late-great cellist Arthur Russell paired with drummer Frantz/bassist Martina Weymouth (as she’s credited here)’s turning, twisting groove, the rest of this box lives up to that chilling-bone ideal.
In particular, freshly remastered takes on the deceptively uncomplicated “The Book I Read” and “Pulled Up” are more crisply jittery than I remembered, the kinetic melodies of “Tentative Decisions” and “Who Is It?” more apparently sing-songy, and the previously unheard Live at CBGB disc is tightly energetic and hot, hot, hot—an unexpected treat, considering Talking Heads’ vexing icy-veined start. Though Byrne’s unique squawking vision reminds you how novel he was, the roles of Weymouth, Frantz, and Harrison come across here as equally iconic. There’s a reason Byrne’s solo albums don’t sound like Talking Heads, and those reasons all commence with 77.
While the music within this deluxe edition is worth wow-crowing about, so, too, is Rhino’s flip top box design and the package’s 80-page hardcover book filled with show fliers and words of wisdom from the Heads themselves.
