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David Byrne - Live from Austin, Texas
- With David Byrne’s newest tour crossing the country, it seems only appropriate to exhume one of the former Talking Heads’ frontman’s few live albums to see what Byrne has to offer onstage.
“Live from Austin, Texas” was recorded during Byrne’s performance at the Austin City Limits music festival in 2001. Joined onstage by his backing band and members of Tosca, an Austin-based tango ensemble, Byrne performs hits from his nearly three decades of music-making with the same degree of passion, vitality and creativity he displayed nearly 20 years ago when Talking Heads still ruled the art-rock/punk/New Wave world the band helped invent.
Byrne has a peculiar legacy when it comes to live albums. He may be one of the few musicians alive who has not one but two genre-defining in-concert records to his name. “Stop Making Sense” is commonly considered the seminal concert film, capturing Talking Heads in all of their glory visually and aurally; the accompanying soundtrack album is a testament to the latter. Meanwhile, “The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads” finds Byrne and company performing in both their stripped-down early days in the late ‘70s and in 1980, as the band began to diversify its sound and increase the number of backing instrumentalists. With its remarkable performance and sound quality, “Name” is a spectacular double live album capturing a great band at not one but two of its finest eras.
Both of these earlier records are terrific thanks largely to Byrne’s bizarre expressiveness and idiosyncratic onstage behavior; the frontman’s charisma and energy only intensify the live experience offered by the Talking Heads’ two live albums. Therefore, it is a testament to Byrne’s talent that one of his live solo offerings can stand up against his seminal band’s earlier offerings.
Much of the credit for the strength of “Austin” must go to Byrne’s talent as an innovator. Throughout his career, Byrne has continuously re-arranged songs from his catalogue, never allowing a number to become stagnant through overplaying. This tendency is readily apparent on this album as Byrne adds a completely new flavor to some of his oldest tunes. Six of the 13 tracks are songs originally released by Talking Heads, including massively popular singles “Once in a Lifetime” and “This Must Be the Place (Naďve Melody).” On “Austin,” these songs move away from their funky, art-rock roots to become smooth, danceable, even sexy numbers with very prominent Latin influences.
The Latin flavor of the non-Talking Heads songs is a bit more predictable. With titles like “Desconocido Soy,” it’s hard not to imagine the tune is anything but tango-infused. And, ever since Byrne’s debut solo album, “Rei Momo,” he has dabbled in the realm of world music. Like contemporary musicians including Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel, Byrne fused elements of music from regions of the world such as Latin America and Africa to craft a distinctive blend of international rock. Unlike his peers, though, Byrne added a legitimate sense of discovery to his work while the others simply seemed to copy other countries’ musical traditions in order to profit and revitalize their own flagging careers.
It’s Byrne’s re-working of his Talking Heads material, though, that truly makes “Austin” arresting. Transforming the galloping hi-hat on “What a Day That Was” (from “Stop Making Sense”) into a shimmying maraca part is just one example of Byrne’s dedication to innovation on the album. Perhaps an even better example is his reimaging of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” originally a hit for Whitney Houston, into a stripped-down dance number complete with live orchestra and Byrne’s signature neurotic vocals. “Austin” may not be able to match the excellence of Byrne’s live work with Talking Heads but it does offer a dynamic glimpse of a unique artist in the rock pantheon who has retained his vitality when many others have lost their artistry in the same amount of time.
Reviewer: Adam Rowan
new
Reviewer's Rating: 7.5
Reader's Rating: 9.00
Reader's Votes: 1
Added: 17-Jun-2009
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