David Byrne - The Knee Plays

Theatrical soundtrack with accompanying DVD slideshow

When Byrne composed original music for Robert Wilson’s 1984 stage production The Civil Wars, he was still leading Talking Heads, and brought elements of the group’s sonic palette to the mini-vignettes. The Knee Plays, as the pieces were called, were originally standalone segments but, gathered together for their CD debut, they flow surprisingly well. In keeping with Wilson’s representation of America through the ages, Byrne drew upon varying genres, such as jazz, gospel and country, to show the nation’s diversity, aided by top-flight musos, including New Orleans’ own Dirty Dozen Brass Band. The Sound Of Business has the noir atmosphere of a hard-boiled 50s detective thriller, with Byrne’s spoken voiceover not dissimilar to the deadpan narrations he would use in his 1986 True Stories movie. Byrne’s disjointed epigrams will be familiar to fans of Heads’ Remain In Light or Speaking In Tongues, albeit couched in a broader sweep of musical styles, as if Aaron Copeland had fallen in with an art school nerd clique. Earlier Byrne side-projects, such as the Eno collaboration My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts or the Twyla Tharp dance company commission The Catherine Wheel, were arguably too avant-garde for mass consumption, but here he’s both suitably idiosyncratic and pleasingly accessible.

Nonesuch | 3032282

Reviewed by Terry Staunton
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