Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Beat Instrumental SEPTEMBER 1978 - by Peter Douglas

TALKING HEADS: MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD

A lot was promised and a lot was delivered. This long-awaited follow-up to the admirable 77 album has been, as everyone knows by now, produced by Brian Eno whose official task was to "make us sound more like what we sound like... hear the more interesting things that are going on." Thus spake nervous and reluctant guru David Byrne just before they set off for the Bahamas, and despite certain slight reservations which have been expressed since by the band, the idea has paid off handsomely.

The essential difference between More Songs and 77 lies in the texture of the sounds; 77 was sparse, clean and sterile. One felt that the producer had emerged with it from the studio like a surgeon who had just delivered a test-tube baby - the master tape held at arm's length between a pair of forceps as the proud parents waited expectantly on the other side of the glass.

This time they've all been in there together, with the result that it sounds warm and live. The neurosis is still there - obviously, otherwise it wouldn't be Talking Heads. But the nerve-jangling edge is now tempered with something approaching enjoyment - gusto, even. In short, the band has matured emotionally and musically. More singing, more keyboard and guitar over-dubs, and more variety - more of everything, by golly.

The album begins in brisk style, led off by drummer Chris Frantz's rolling triple-beat on Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, which all but segues into With Our Love, whose sound is hauntingly filled out with some distinctly Eno-ized synthesizer chords. The Good Thing is superb - more relaxed, with some nice back-up singing from Tina Weymouth, and some typically sweet guitar tones, similar in many ways to the kind achieved by Television on their albums. In fact, if you wanted a description of the Talking Heads sound, you could do worse than to term it 'up-tempo Television'. Warning Sign features a return to the edgy, unnerving style that Byrne has made his trademark, but made more so by the clever use of phased vocals. The Girls Want To Be With The Girls steals Ray Davies' Tired Of Waiting For You riff to great effect, then blossoms out into something entirely different, with some chillingly beautiful organ and guitar, making it one of the many gems on the album. Found A Job is a more straightforward strutter.

Plenty more good news on the second side, but More Songs is so rich and diverse that I could ramble on for many paragraphs. Alongside Steve Hacket's recent album, this is the most musically stimulating I've heard since last Christmas. It is not instantly accessible to the listener, but then neither was the first album; fear not - once those songs have got their hooks into your brain, nothing short of major surgery is ever likely to remove them.