Product Description

Though the previous album FEAR OF MUSIC provided a bit of foreshadowing, Talking Heads fans could never have guessed what was in store for them with the release of REMAIN IN LIGHT. A visionary work of innovation and inspiration, it's arguably one of the finest albums of the 1980s. The band leaves behind the two-guitars-over-a-quirky-rock-beat ethic of theirprevious work, adoping a funky, modal approach. Abandoning traditional song form and chord progressions, the tunes hereare built around layers of overdubbed keyboard, guitar and percussion parts that weave around each other in an almost fugue-like manner, relying on the adding and subtracting of elements in the mix for dynamics, instead of on chord changesand structural development.
It was a radical approach for a rock band, and it's reflected in the lyrics as well. Byrne abandons his urban paranoia of old in favour of a more spiritual, third world-influenced style of writing. Adrian Belew injects some grit with his postpunk-psychedelia guitar work (suggestive of his upcoming work with King Crimson, as isthe overall sound of REMAIN IN LIGHT). This one is for the ages.

Track Listing

1. Great Curve
2. Crosseyed And Painless
3. Born Under Punches (Heat Goes On)
4. Houses In Motion
5. Once In A Lifetime
6. Listening Wind
7. Seen And Not Seen
8. Overload

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2533 in Music
• Released on: 1984-04-24
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Way back in 1980, the original wave of Talking Heads fans were pleasantly stunned to hear Remain in Light, produced and co-written by Brian Eno, on which Byrne and company are joined by guitar god Adrian Belew, and funk legends Bernie Worrell (keyboards) and Steven Scales (percussion), among others, for a fuller, funkier sound nobody imagined they had in them. The first three songs are long, layered, full-body dance parties, with incessantly repeated phrases (musical and lyrical), and increasingly catchy melodic hooks that won't let go for days. "Once in a Lifetime" was the big hit, but the rockingest track is the third, "The Great Curve", after which the songs get more linear and subdued. It's still great stuff, right through to the especially Eno-like droner, "The Overload", but the second half is maybe better to sleep to than dance to. Which is fine: after the exuberance of the first three songs, you'll need a little nap. --Dan Leone

Customer Reviews

Best Talking Heads album
Being in the ownership of every studio album the Talking Heads have released, "Remain In Light" is my favourite of them all. If you're new to Talking Heads, I would recommend BUYING THIS ALBUM - it's much more accessible than their more widely-known "Fear Of Music" and yet holds most of the experimental nature of the previous album which serves "Remain In Light"'s brilliance.

The first track, "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)" is my favourite Talking Heads song, and the album also features the amazing "The Great Curve" and the widely-accredited "Once In A Lifetime".

Aside from this album, get "Fear Of Music". I'd also reccommend "Naked" - it's underrated and amazing.

inspiring
This album cannot be faulted. A seminal example that of funk rock that is absolutely timeless and sends shivers up my spine at every listen...music like this will never be repeated with such class

A magical record
If anyone needs to be persuaded why Talking Heads were just a great band, not merely a great new wave band or a great post-punk band but a band up there with anyone else, 'Remain In Light', their ineffably spooky and moving masterpiece, is surely the evidence required.

The band's singer and chief songwriter David Byrne was, by his own admission, suffering writer's block around 1980. He had just written the bulk of three increasingly brilliant and increasingly dark Heads albums - '77', 'More Songs About Buildings And Food' and 'Fear Of Music' - and was understandably a little burned out. Producer Brian Eno and he were forming a close friendship and working partnership that other members of the band, chiefly bass player Tina Weymouth, felt was becoming over-intellectual and elitist. The band had various goes at making this album, in various studios, and ended up splicing bits of jams together to make something like songs. Byrne and Eno wrote odd bits of lyrics to sing over the top, and session players like Adrian Belew and Jon Hassell were brought in to provide tasteful (or in Belew's case, fabulously untasteful) musical embellishment. Other people have tried the same method since. It has almost never worked.

Whatever the unhappy circumstances of its making, 'Remain In Light' was a combination of the Heads rhythm section's exceptionally funky drive, Byrne's worry and paranoia, Eno's benign world-music inclusivity, and some special extra ingredient that lifts the whole thing into a frankly mystical level of trancelike intensity and directness. The whole album is laced with gossamer-fine overdubs, so that every time you listen to it you hear something you hadn't heard before. It moves from the urgent and faintly menacing ('Crosseyed and Painless') to the devastatingly sad ('Listening Wind') to the trippily ecstatic ('Once In A Lifetime') with seemingly no strain.

It's one of my favourite albums of all time, as you can probably tell, and it contains my favourite recording of all time in the form of 'Once In A Lifetime', the record that takes the nausea out of existentialism and replaces it with something very like bliss.

Talking Heads made many fine recordings before and after, some as good as this, perhaps. Brian Eno never made anything as good ever again. This was also the recording in which the schism that would later tear the band apart first became evident. Check out the solo recordings that the various members made around this time (Byrne's 'The Catherine Wheel', Harrison's 'The Red and the Black', Weymouth's and Frantz's 'Tom Tom Club') and you will begin to see why, eight years later, Talking Heads would be no more.

They were fab. And this is their finest almost-hour.