Talking Heads Little Creatures CD

This Dualdisc features the full album on the CD side along with bonus CD tracks "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere," along with an extended mix of "Television Man>" The DVD side presents the music videos for "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere."

Talking Heads: David Byrne (guitar, vocals); Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar, background vocals); Tina Weymouth (bass, background vocals); Chris Frantz (drums).
Additional personnel: Eric Weissberg (steel guitar); Jimmy Macdonell (accordion); Lenny Pickett (saxophone); Andrew "El Pantalones" Cader (washboard); Steve Scales, Nana Vasconcelos (percussion); Ellen Bernfeld, Erin Dickens, Diva Gray, Gordon Grody, Lani Groves, Kurt Yahijian (background vocals).
Recorded at Sigma Sound, New York, New York.
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); Jerry Harrison (guitar, keyboards, background vocals); Tina Weymouth (bass instrument, background vocals); Chris Frantz (drums).
Additional personnel: Eric Weissberg (pedal steel guitar); Jimmy Macdonell (accordion); Lenny Pickett (saxophone); Naná Vasconcelos (drum); Steve Scales (congas, bongos, tambourine); Andrew "El Pantalones" Cader (washboard); Ellen Bernfeld, Erin Dickens, Gordon Grody, Kurt Yahijian, Diva Gray, Lani Groves (background vocals).
Talking Heads' most immediately accessible album, Little Creatures eschewed the pattern of recent Heads albums, in which instrumental tracks had been worked up from riffs and grooves, after which David Byrne improvised melodies and lyrics. The songs on Little Creatures, most of which were credited to Byrne alone (with the band credited only with arrangements) sounded like they'd been written as songs. Perhaps as one result, the band had been streamlined, with extra musicians used only for specific effects rather than playing along as an ensemble. Byrne, who was singing in his natural range for once, frequently was augmented with backup singers. The overall result: ear candy. Little Creatures was a pop album, and an accomplished one, by a band that knew what it was doing. True, Byrne's lyrics were still intriguingly quirky, but even his subject matter was becoming more mature. "I've seen sex and I think it's okay," he sang on "Creatures of Love," and suddenly the geek had become a man. Where he had once pondered the hopes of boys and girls, he was now making observations about children. And even if his impulses remained strange -- "I wanna make him stay up all night," he declared about a baby (presumably not his own) in "Stay Up Late" -- he retained his charm and inventiveness. Little Creatures was, in a sense, Talking Heads lite. It was hard to think of this as the same band that produced "Psycho Killer." But for the band's expanding audience, who made this their second platinum album, that was okay. And their popularity was being accomplished with no diminution in their creativity. ~ William Ruhlmann
After the abstract funk experimentation of REMAIN IN LIGHT and SPEAKING IN TONGUES, the Heads decided to return to their roots with LITTLE CREATURES. They abandoned the modal, polyrhythmic approach in favor of the two-guitars/4/4 pop structures of yore. While LITTLE CREATURES is the band's most accessible, radio-friendly album, it's not a step backwards by any means, because as they return to the quirky "new wave" style that made them famous, they bring a well-earned sophistication (both harmonic and lyrical) to the table. These advances allow the band to knock out a crop of winners, like the anti-anthem "Road To Nowhere," the semi-mystical (but still damn catchy) "And She Was" and the we've-got-a-baby-now, let's-party-with-him rocker "Stay Up Late." Nothing here is as groundbreaking as BUILDINGS AND FOOD, but it's still the Talking Heads, full of idiosyncratic charm and smart-but-infectious tunes.

CMJ (1/5/04, p.16) - Ranked #5 in CMJ's "Top 20 Most-Played Albums of 1985"