Talking Heads Speaking In Tongues CD

This Dualdisc presents the entire album, along with 2 bonus CD tracks. The DVD side features an alternate 5.1 audio mix of "Burning Down the House" and the video for "This Must Be the Place."

Talking Heads: David Byrne (vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion); Tina Weymouth (guitar, keyboards, bass, background vocals); Jerry Harrison (guitar, keyboards, background vocals); Chris Frantz (drums, keyboards, background vocals).
Additional personnel: Alex Weir (guitar); Shankar (violin); Richard Landry (saxophone); Wally Badarou, Bernie Worrell (synthesizer); Steve Scales, David Van Tieghem (percussion); Dolette MacDonald, Nona Hendryx (background vocals).
This is a DualDisc, which contains a CD on one side of the disc and a DVD on the other.
Talking Heads: David Byrne (vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass guitar, percussion); Jerry Harrison (guitar, keyboards, background vocals); Tina Weymouth (guitar, synthesizer, bass instrument, background vocals); Chris Frantz (synthesizer, drums, background vocals).
Additional personnel: Alex Weir (guitar); Shankar (violin); Richard Landry (saxophone); Wally Badarou, Bernie Worrell (synthesizer); Raphael Dejesus, David Van Tieghem, Steve Scales (percussion); Nona Hendryx (background vocals).
Talking Heads found a way to open up the dense textures of the music they had developed with Brian Eno on their two previous studio albums for Speaking in Tongues, and were rewarded with their most popular album yet. Ten backup singers and musicians accompanied the original quartet, but somehow the sound was more spacious, and the music admitted aspects of gospel, notably in the call-and-response of "Slippery People," and John Lee Hooker-style blues, on "Swamp." As usual, David Byrne determinedly sang and chanted impressionistic, nonlinear lyrics, sometimes by mix-and-matching clichés ("No visible means of support and you have not seen nothin' yet," he declared on "Burning Down the House," the Heads' first Top Ten hit), and the songs' very lack of clear meaning was itself a lyrical subject. "Still don't make no sense," Byrne admitted in "Making Flippy Floppy," but by the next song, "Girlfriend Is Better," that had become an order -- "Stop making sense," he chanted over and over. Some of his charming goofiness had returned since the overly serious Remain in Light and Fear of Music, however, and the accompanying music, filled with odd percussive and synthesizer sounds, could be unusually light and bouncy. The album closer, "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)," even sounded hopeful. Well, sort of. Despite their formal power, Talking Heads' preceding two albums seemed to have painted them into a corner, which may be why it took them three years to craft a follow-up, but on Speaking in Tongues, they found an open window and flew out of it. ~ William Ruhlmann
On REMAIN IN LIGHT, the Heads fused their twitchy, intellectual geek-rock sensibilities with an organic, spiritual funkiness that catapulted them into a new artistic realm, virtually unfettered by the shackles of their "new wave" past. SPEAKING IN TONGUES picks up where that album left off, expanding on the band's newfound funk aesthetic and even upping the danceability quotient a notch or two. The Heads let their hair down a bit more here than on REMAIN IN LIGHT, but while the tone is a bit less serious (as on the party-starting "Burning Down The House,") the highly developed conceptual sensibilites of Byrne and company are still at work, even without the assistance of former producer Brian Eno.
Some of the previous album's airy abstractions are stripped away here, to make more room on the dance floor. Tunes like "Girlfriend is Better" attack both the feet and the mind, in typically quirky Talking Heads style. "This Must Be the Place/Naive Melody" stands out as a pretty, affecting ballad about finding a sense of belonging (it's melodic charms were so pervasive it was eventually covered by folk-rocker Shawn Colvin).

Rolling Stone (11/89) - Ranked #54 in Rolling Stone's 100 Best Albums Of The 80's survey.
CMJ (1/5/04, p.12) - Ranked #12 in CMJ's "Top 20 Most-Played Albums of 1983".
Highly Recommended