335: MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDING and FOOD | TALKING HEADS

Jillian Mapes at Pitchfork writes: When the Ramones and Talking Heads toured Europe in the spring of 1977, Johnny Ramone was annoyed by seemingly everything. The varieties of lettuce served abroad. Stonehenge (“a buncha rocks,” he called it, according to the excellent book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire). And of course, the James Brown tapes that Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth played on the bus. Though the two bands frequently gigged together within the early New York punk scene, the Ramones were all about girl groups and surf rock, while their preppy-looking tourmates—particularly Weymouth and her soon-to-be husband, drummer Chris Frantz—were wild about funky R&B.

Toward the end of the tour, Talking Heads played a small solo show in London. Brian Eno, fresh off making Low with David Bowie, caught the gig and invited the band to lunch the next day, which turned into listening to records at his flat. The producer put on Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac and blew their minds. Afrobeat music (particularly West African polyrhythms) would become the next big influence on the members of Talking Heads, culminating in their magnum opus, 1980’s Remain in Light. But while that was still percolating, the group made an immediate connection with Eno. By the following spring, Talking Heads had kicked their original production team of disco pros to the curb and took up recording More Songs About Buildings and Food alongside Eno in the Bahamas.

Though many tracks on their second album were live staples dating back to 1975, the songs took on a more groove-oriented sound as Talking Heads progressed and played to their strengths. Incorporating disco rhythms separated them further from Television, their closest corollary in the CBGB scene. The tempos were slowed down and simmering, while the layers of instrumentation and effects were built up. You can hear Eno’s “studio as instrument” approach in all sorts of sonic details, like the loudspeaker-style vocals and reverb bouncing off the drums in “Warning Sign,” the curious clicks and dubby echoes punctuating “Stay Hungry,” or the faint twinkling between lines in the chorus of their heady cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” But these increasingly intricate aesthetics never threaten to overthrow the music’s pleasure center: an involuntary compulsion to move your body. On More Songs About Buildings and Food, Talking Heads were sorting out how to engage simultaneously with the mind and the soul (or at least the hips)—how to be both art-rock and dance music. . .