POLL Me Up Up Up Up Up Up Up Up – TALKING HEADS – ILM Artist Poll #82 - (The Results Thread)

your praise was persuasive, but not so much as the free delivery grubhub coupon that was offered to anyone who voted for naked

Did everyone just plain forget about "Lazy" in the solo ballot?

yeah plain forgot

I certainly did! indeed, a strange collective... 'Amnesia'.

xpost - haha : )

I'm a sucker for mature, mid- or late-era works, especially if they are left turns of sorts, and feel strong and inspired. I'll be the guy cheering for Spiritchaser when a future Dead Can Dance album poll comes along.

Didn't forget about "Lazy" but did forget about the Last Emperor soundtrack. think the main title theme would have snuck onto my ballot

I didn't vote for any side-project tracks and stuck to TH albums for the albums vote but am kind of regretting it now. I love MLitBoG but have always thought of it as its own thing - there are definitely some Eno records that I think of as an interesting document of an idea/experiment rather than an actual great album but this has never been one of them.

The Tom Tom Club s/t album is a mixed bag - the four songs that placed are great, the rest of it I can take or leave.

aw man can't believe 77 placed below more songs but hey ho, good discussions so far!
none of the images are loading for me :( it's ok at the moment because i know what the album covers look like but i hope i can see the tracks images

Strange Overtones is a wonderful song. That album all feels a little stiff overall though, although I still really enjoy it.

re: MLitBoG, I'd been primed by listening to 23 Skidoo et al, and treated it as part & parcel with Fear of Music/Remain in Light. Always liked Tom Ewing's writing about it on Freaky Trigger back in the day (part one, part two).

The first half of Naked is great but the second half is just so boring to me. After '(Nothing But) Flowers' finishes it just really doesn't keep my attention, aside for probably 'Facts of Life' which even then is almost ruined by Byrne doing his best Miss Piggy impression half way through. I still couldn't tell you what a couple of the tracks on the second side sound like despite having listened to it so many times.

I guess you could say Remain In Light is similar in that it's front-loaded with energy then cools in the second half, but the songs there are still so much more captivating than the ones on Naked.

I don't mind those last songs on Naked. They're kind of cool and moody. Not exactly punchy, memorable things, but then I find the second half of Remain In Light a bit pale compared to the first half so...

as i said in the voting thread i find the second side of naked rough-going but "cool water" is basically my favorite talking heads song, more radiohead than "radiohead" or even radiohead

^ It's *so* good. Especially that final minute or two.

"Are we nothing in your eyes? Someone answer! Someone answer!" etc.

I'l grudgingly concede "Cool Water," thanks to the synth and the angry, growing riff

Off Naked I'll happily rep for Blind, Mr Jones, Totally Nude, Nothing But Flowers, Democratic Circus, Mommy Daddy, Cool Water. And it's not like there's anything actually GRATING about the rest of the songs, whereas there's stuff on LC and TS that have me reaching for the skip button.

i also like "the democratic circus" and "facts of life" which tap into the same doomy vibe if less successfully. it's the "big daddy mommy and bill" songs or whatever that cause me to tune out

that's an xp

little creatures is def better than naked

no

Actually I'm listening to 'Cool Water' and I'm not sure I like it much. That 'Work work work' refrain is lousy

:|

Naked is great

a lot of the songs on naked have really cool endings attached to otherwise pointlessly circling songs, e.g. "big daddy"

Here's the old thread w/good discussion: Talking Heads' "Naked" – Classic or Dud?

I may be the only one on here who really likes Big Daddy. I'm a sucker for all the horns and steel guitars on this album.

I'm trying to put my finger on why the post Stop Making Sense albums do nothing for me and it's hard to explain - I mean really it's just that I don't find the songs very compelling - but it's got me thinking about who I'd compare them to at that stage. A couple of people mentioned TMBG in the voting thread which seems OTM (they're also a band I only like a few scattered songs by) but who else? What would you even describe Little Creatures as? Post-new wave? Maybe not.

It's that horrible 80s drum sound on LC, stuff from that era still makes me cringe. I was hugely disappointed by Naked at the time. After not touching it for over a couple decades, I enjoyed listening to it last night. However, not a single track can really compete with the first five albums.

I feel Harrison's The Red And The Black didn't do well (to say the least, not a single track got a vote?) because it was out of print and hard to find for so long (it never did come out on CD). I messed up and thought the side projects ballot was albums.

https://open.spotify.com/album/2lm0ytMRpYQPcv11JFASDl

They just sound like a totally different band after Speaking In Tongues

and I agree, the drums are horrible and really offputting

I feel Harrison's The Red And The Black didn't do well (to say the least, not a single track got a vote?) because it was out of print and hard to find for so long (it never did come out on CD). I messed up and thought the side projects ballot was albums.

he's also a nothing singer

Little Creatures feels like an alternate universe follow-up to 77 or More Songs

^^^^ otm

i love the drum sound on little creatures, and also how prominent the drums are in the mix. they feel a little muted on speaking in tongues

I'm trying to put my finger on why the post Stop Making Sense albums do nothing for me

This is what I meant by the sabbatical in the last thread - the one between Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues.

Maybe I'm just a big Eno guy and never realized it.

It's the E.T. Thorngren influence: listen to those Robert Palmer records from the same period. I'll agree, though, that Frantz uses the same beat on many tracks.

is there much written about the recording of Speaking in Tongues anywhere?

One of its charming qualities is that the tracks sound like demos, which makes sense if you consider it's their first self-produced album.

re SIT: Byrne was going to leave, thinking the band had exhausted its possibilities. Then Tom Tom Club became a bigger deal than anyone imagined – they got a gold record before Talking Heads did.

there must be a temporal effect for people who experienced TH at the time. Because I came to TH via SMS, I was introduced to their catalogue as a whole and therefore didn't really think of Speaking In Tongues as a 'comeback album', just another album of funk-wave songs after Remain In Light. It's also got some of my favourite SMS songs on there, so I can't really separate it in terms of quality from the previous albums. LC feels like the big break-away in terms of style because it's miles away from the funk-experimentalism of their previous stuff. Really it sounds like just a big AOR pop-rock album but it's hampered by the production style of the times.

It's that horrible 80s drum sound on LC, stuff from that era still makes me cringe.

In my half-assed, incomplete relistening for this poll, I didn't find the drums on LC cringeworthy at all. Listening to the SMS soundtrack, on the other hand, I was reminded that Frantz' live drum tracks were replaced with electronic drums -- "Girlfriend Is Better" sounds especially dated in this regard.

fwiw, I first heard both records on/near their release dates, but only SMS still sounds cringey-'80s to me in terms of production.

totally agree

There are some good tracks but SMS has always felt to me like a much better movie than album.

^^ very much otm, though the SiT tracks and "What a Day It Was" hold up on record

the SMS version of Crosseyed and Painless with the extended intro is great. the extended intro got cut off the Name of This Band version on the reissue for some reason unfortunately. the acoustic Psycho Killer is one of my favourite versions of it and I like Life During Wartime with the added keyboard solos a lot too, which covers most of it really, the only weak section is Heaven through to Found a Job, and Genius of Love. the electronic drums are definitely weird though but I think one issue of it has the original drums on at least some of the tracks?

Do people generally listen to the 9-track version of SMS or the 16-track version from '99? I think that for some reason the later version made it seem irrelevant — like it was a truncation of the film rather than its own entity like the original album (maybe partly because the DVD came out around the same time). But I haven't heard the original in years.

enjoyed reading the Tom Ewing article, thanks etc for posting it

also agree with Tarfumes above about LC/SMS, although I've made my peace with all '80s percussion

i don't mind the little creatures drum production. it's of the period, and it's not my favorite approach in general, but the album has a coherent, well-integrated sound. it all pretty much works, for want of a better word. agree that stop making sense is much more badly harmed by the dated, synthetic percussion.

are we ready for today?

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-G7gJ5kUGAxOWBmtO7EWu00Ze3KkVYgq3CAKGdnpGem8DruvB538JypTq_J2jMYtE56r8BtcK9rS9M_IzB6BwCKTimm7YPMpvo3wjQahAgSUlGMN9OO6F0zYPec-RLn-ceqMa3TJWfiFj0VP1HrW7Vnw8BxaMyFccNhPn7wkSG0I05-w6Nbin9f8sWPRCM9eD6I1C1th1D-m2CeJO4htTlXofACtsNjCJqR8kuFCEx8_mmYxSWoMMiBdZqXUfrrBWyjsiKTXL6Xg1R6E-AFqeP52zFLGyoMxh-mNG3UIegxQpjUXONerHLc0D2_M9EhM18cQws1lUQsGr4FSjyzhWV1OfJfbQvtkakmTLHwWY9lr0z-H47G3D5XskapjhA-lyszSvf9lvlpbwo8SrsDDtrMpJi-PXr_Q-TTdU5J_Hr3B46ml8ErznomnRihCbzuFQhFnVpU9tPND5ywU3ADQ1oZ0PUMjWX9tK4rM8ctHGsMGp_Dd-tnJt1Wl52nP6bwnZTpW0nHHXBNivop0XcQJRa1j8IBcsyHUH4N47tcZnTGUmoHQSVtWp6KYkXnmjQ2Ks8Q9VKh7WeBcPGWOyUfbut3bHR_qVUmUWwrOQdIBugo7kcRuHhzRU8ZDnH75unkPriBYeKYbzoB9ZVFNdtZ7_I832tgkdvSMSjlV-zG_=w500-h528-no

The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads
Released:March 24, 1982
1253 Points, 30 Votes, 5 Number Ones

too low

So glad this got such a great reissue and new attention. I lucked into a vinyl copy as a birthday present when I was a kid and always loved it.