So what exactly is “new wave” music? And what is its relationship to this thing called “post-punk”? Am I expected to believe that Duran Duran, a yacht-sailing boyband wearing blazers rolled up to their elbows, are part of the same musical genre as Talking Heads, creators of the thoroughly insane album that is the subject of this review? Well, from what I understand, the standard narrative goes something like this; the music industry in the 1970s was a closed shop of stilted classic rock, dominated by the ossified, bearded, once-rebellious-now-establishment patriarchs of the 60s and early 70s, until punk blew the doors off with an aggressive, pared down, closer-to-the-audience vibe. At the same time, a new generation of bands eagerly embraced emerging technology – especially synthesisers and digital methods of recording. So whatever separated groups like Talking Heads and Duran Duran, they shared certain sonic and attitudinal commonalities and, most importantly, they were identifiably not the Eagles (or, for that matter, the Sex Pistols).
That’s the narrative, and there’s something to it, but in my opinion, it doesn’t quite capture the distinctive moods implied by the terms “new wave” and “post-punk.” My own working definition is as follows: post-punk represents a kind of depressed hangover after the manic, venomous vigour of punk, the bull in the China shop suddenly running out of energy, collapsing into an exhausted stupor, and deciding to turn up the bass in the mix because it sounded moodier. In my opinion, and in the wake of the all-guns-blazing bounciness of punk, post-punk has to sound a little bit depressed, a little bit weary, a little bit eerie.
New wave, by contrast, is more of a musical style and, in my view, it’s inextricably linked to the synthesiser. If a band didn’t use synths – in fact, didn’t foreground synths – then they weren’t new wave, which has to sound a bit electronic, a bit futuristic, a bit mechanical and robotic – post-human, somehow, perhaps married to a certain post-gender dandyishness, as with, say, the Human League or early Depeche Mode. According to my definitions, Joy Division are post-punk; New Order are new wave, even though Power, Corruption, and Lies, for example, has a clear, coldly downcast post-punk vibe, whereas “Decades” by Joy Division is as synth-heavy as the most (Roy) batty of Gary Numan records. These are imperfect categories, but that’s how I look at it, and I’m sticking with them until better definitions suggest themselves.
Which brings us to Talking Heads – where do they fit into my (possibly idiosyncratic) classificatory system? Well, judging by Remain in Light, they could defensibly be characterised as both post-punk and new wave. The politicised, outward-lashing – but life-affirming – belligerence of the Sex Pistols or the Clash is conspicuous by its absence, replaced by the subdued, pessimistic introspection that I associate with Joy Division or the early Cure records. Moreover, they are indisputably new wave; weird, inorganic, futuristic sounding.
But Remain in Light is not so much a collection of songs as a gathering of mood pieces, like a film soundtrack. David Byrne later said that the Talking Heads’ main achievement was to reduce the characteristic, pared-down punk song structure of three-chords to just one – basically, to extract even the residual traces of melody from a musical genre not known for its melodiousness. And indeed, almost everything on this album is built around relentless basslines which chug along unchangingly for five or six minutes, but which build to a frenzy as shrill, stabbing guitars, strange sound effects, and unsettling vocals are layered over the top. Only alterations in the vocal style or sound effects indicate transitions between different sections, raising the question of if there’s any relationship at all to punk, rather than, say, the similarly mechanistic, ambient electronica of Kraftwerk or Tangerine Dream.
Lyrically, most of the album is, surely, gibberish. Apparently, David Byrne filled pages and pages of paper with random lines that he hoped might fit with the music the band were composing. I’m usually sceptical of such an approach – I take the view that lyrics should comprise the hard, conscious intellect of a song; the music its emotional background; otherwise, what’s the point in writing lyrics? You may as well just harmonise, like Sigur Rós or something similarly twatty. On Remain in Light, however, the effect is interesting because, when set against the unrelentingly monotonal basslines and the gathering, layered walls of sound, the fragmented and unintelligible lyrics contribute to an overall sense that this record is, ultimately, about going insane and experiencing a psychotic break with reality. Of course, Talking Heads wouldn’t be the first or the last band to write a concept album about madness. However, the lyrics on, say, Dark Side of the Moon or The Hurting mostly offer a cohesive, intelligible, and therefore rational account of this experience. By contrast, the sheer fractured meaningless of the lyrics on Remain in Light illuminate the shattered mind of the psychotic in a different, and perhaps more poignant, way.
Side 1 of the album – which consists of only three songs – is the most reflective of this experience of schizophrenic perplexity. The opener, “Born under Punches”, is a discombobulating, spooky mishmash of reggae, world music, and angular electronica, all set to a trademark, minimalistic, unceasing bassline, with raving, Kafka-esque lyrics about an unhinged civil servant. The second song, “Crosseyed and Painless”, documents a similar miasma, but its final verse comes slightly closer to semantic intelligibility, by essaying a quintessentially psychotic revolt against the constraints of reality itself and “facts”. The culminatory burst of unfiltered madness comes on “The Great Curve”, in which the structures of conventional grammar break down, and David Byrne prostrates himself at the altar of the Eternal Feminine.
Side 2 of Remain in Light transitions from the certifiable insanity of the first three songs to the quiet madness of middle-class life in the West – another fertile topic for rock music, before and since. “Once in a Lifetime” sounds brighter than the other songs on the album and, though it articulates bewilderment at the maddening banalities of bourgeois existence, it also offers a certain… well, perhaps not optimism, but at least Buddhistic acceptance and resignation, a willingness to go with the flow and “let the days go by”. Here, the constant driving bassline conjures not so much the harrowing relentlessness of existence, as on side 1, but rather the capacity for unbending human resilience in the face of the quiet desperation which is our common destiny, apparently.
But darkness descends once again after the brief ray of sunshine signified by “Once in a Lifetime.” On “Houses in Motion”, the status seeking mania of life in the West is likened to a man digging his own grave. The slow-paced, synth-heavy “Seen and not Seen” offers a bizarre spoken-word monologue about a man who fixates on a mental image of the ideal face in the hope that, over time, the physical architecture of his own visage will come to resemble it. The third “verse” enters fully into the lunacy of this concept by flagging potential problems with it. The combination of haunting, stripped down, tuneless electronica, and a disconcerting, subtly unhinged spoken word monologue, is highly precipitative of Radiohead, who were, to put it mildly, heavily indebted to the Talking Heads.
Remain in Light’s post-punk nadir is finally arrived at on the last two songs, “Listening Wind” and “The Overload”, a couplet of subdued, intensely sinister synth numbers. “Listening Wind” provides perhaps the most – and maybe the only – coherent lyric on the album; it tells the tale of Mojique, a Native American who, resentful at the colonisers, decides to take matters into his own hands through an act of terrorism. The album’s central theme of burgeoning insanity is intriguingly elided with the “spiritual wisdom” of those civilisations which became the victims of Western colonialism, which raises the question of where Western concepts of “madness” end and non-Western notions of “spiritualism” begin.
“The Overload”, meanwhile, reinstates the cryptic lyrics of side 1 but, in fact, it’s so redolent of Joy Division that it borders on copyright infringement; the vocals and oblique lyrics are pure Ian Curtis, while the slow paced and suggestive synths don’t so much approach as positively mimic the closing tracks of Closer. Apparently, Talking Heads wrote this song after reading reviews of, but without actually listening to, Joy Division; a story which I rather doubt, given the uncomfortable proximity to “I Remember Nothing” or “Decades.” Copying bastards.
In the end, I wouldn’t say that I’m a massive fan of Remain in Light; it’s a little bit too arty, a little bit too lacking in melody, conciseness, and lyrical poignancy for my taste. Yes, it’s suggestive and subliminal; it’s certainly a unique sound, if we ignore the Joy Division covers; and its enduring influence probably can’t be understated (I always assumed Radiohead were the true innovators of Britpop, forging new paths in the face of Blur’s and Oasis’ shameless 60s rip-offs, but it turns out that they merely gravitated towards a different musical tradition). On balance, though, it’s not an album that I readily reach for, and the songs that I do come back to are basically Joy Division without Ian Curtis.
6/10
Highlights: “Once in a Lifetime”, “Listening Wind”, “The Overload”