Description
No Compassion is more mundane, and more menacing because of it, with a narrator who calmly rationalizes his own refusal to empathize with anyone. Opening with an uncharacteristically hard-rocking riff and lurching between two drastically different tempos, it feels like a last vestige of affinity with the punk scenes heavier and more nihilistic tendencies. Still, its message probably shouldnt be taken at face value. So many people have their problems/Im not interested in their problems, Byrne moans at one point, a rich sentiment coming from a guy beset by problems on all sides and eager to tell you about it, whose response to the joys of new love is a resounding uh oh.
These moments of intensity arise as occasional spasms across an otherwise upbeat and approachable album. At times, Talking Heads: 77 seems to leapfrog the stormy minimalism the band would pursue across the trio of Brian Eno collaborations that followed this album, and instead offer a budget approximation of the pancultural dance party they threw on 1983s Speaking in Tongues. Talking Heads: 77 abounds with ecstatic rhythms and bright sonic details: a honky-tonk piano disguised as a disco bassline on The Book I Read; mallets and Latin percussion building toward a sultry sax refrain on First Week / Last Week Carefree; a toylike synthesizer on Dont Worry About the Government, a song whose cheeriness in the face of alienation is both heartening and unsettling. The Talking Heads of 77 come off like enthusiastic collagists rather than master sculptors: these sounds are thrilling on their own, but they dont always cohere with the holism of later albums.
On Tentative Decisions, Byrne engages in a one-man call-and-response, switching between his usual whine and a cartoonishly stentorian low register, simulating the interplay of lead and backing vocalists on any number of old pop and soul records. This was a new kind of self-awareness for rock bands, who by the mid-70s were steeped in decades of pop history, and anxiously searching for their own place within it. Talking Heads articulated that self-awareness without ever sounding smug or lapsing into parody, twisting pops stock gestures into new shapes while maintaining their core musical appeal. It was a feat no one had accomplished in quite the same way before them, and no one would repeat in quite the same way. No one except the Talking Heads, that is: Byrne would closely replicate the Tentative Decisions vocal arrangement on the chorus of Slippery People, from Speaking in Tongues. But by 1983, he had an actual chorus of slick-sounding backing singersthe distance between Talking Heads and the rest of the world growing smaller, but never collapsing entirely.
After its tense final chorus, Tentative Decisions explodes into the most jubilant stretch of music on Talking Heads: 77, an instrumental coda with a four-on-the-floor drumbeat, congas tapping at the edges, and high-stepping piano from Harrisonall of it repeating with minimal variation as the song fades out. More than anything, it sounds like house music, a genre that wouldnt come along for a few years, but would eventually leave a seismic imprint on pop. Talking Heads stumble into the resemblance on Tentative Decisions, and stumble quickly out of it. Still, in 1977, they didnt need to rush toward the future. They were already there. (via Pitchfork)
Label: Rhino, Sire
Format: 2 x Vinyl, Reissue, Remastered
Reissued: 2024 / Original Release: 1977
Genre: Rock
Style: New Wave, Art Rock
File under: School of Rock
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