David Byrne - American Utopia

The Guardian 60

(Todo Mundo / Nonesuch)

For those of us accustomed to thinking of David Byrne as an articulator of American anxiety – his band Talking Heads filled the late 70s and 80s with jittery art disguised as pop – his latest album, American Utopia, requires some readjustment. Songs like Every Day Is a Miracle skew largely towards the bright side – a mature and thoughtful reaction to the despair felt by many in the wake of Trump’s presidency.

This being Byrne, one of pop’s most refreshing thinkers, it’s not as simple as chipper equanimity, however. Bullet, for one, is a superficially lovely song about a bullet finding its mark. Everybody’s Coming to My House (made with longtime foil Brian Eno) is a funky workout in which Byrne finds that “we’re only tourists in this life”.

Pitchfork 58

David Byrne’s first true solo album in 14 years is daring and open-hearted. The risks Byrne takes on these songs, however, too often feel clumsy or gaudy.

The Guardian 40

(Nonesuch)

The would-be Roland Barthes of the five boroughs continues his puckish, lifelong interrogation of contemporary culture. As ever, his focus is the banal stuff of everyday yuppiedom – money, cars, tourism, shopping – and there is a Once in a Lifetime-style anxiety running through it all. But like some evangelistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he also finds potential and even a kind of poetry in it. The album title, he has said, is not ironic: Byrne seems to hope, like the ultimate “centrist dad”, that we can shift our capitalist culture into a more progressive mode.

More ideas, then, than most artists attempt, but the delivery is uneven. Every Day Is a Miracle has a lovely, swelling chorus melody, but its lyrics are toxically whimsical, full of heavenly chickens and newspaper-ignoring elephants. Byrne’s menagerie expands on Dog’s Mind, a secular hymn which compares the pampered middle classes to their canine pets: “Now a dog cannot imagine / What it is to drive a car / And we, in turn, are limited / By what it is we are.” The album is full of pronouncements like this, that aim at being zen kōans for a smartphone age, but fall intellectually short.