"Speaking In Tongues" falls into the latter category. I hated that album at the time--I thought that it was an artistic letdown. It was a tremendous commercial success--but this fact alone proves that if you want to be a success with the great American middle, you have to dumb down your sound.
I think that the Heads certainly did in this case. It didn't have to be. The Tom Tom Club released an outstanding debut album a year or so earlier, and Jerry Harrison still rates as one of my fav musicians. I just think that David Byrne had run out of ideas by this time, and without Brian Eno to work his magic, it all fell flat.
I can now hear why. On "Speaking In Tongues," the Heads sound like a band self-consciously working hard to be funky. If you have to *try* to sound funky, you're gonna miss the groove. Funky is not something you can try to be--you simply are, or you aren't. No middle. "Remain In Light," by contrast, transcends because the band wasn't trying to "sound" funky--they just were, in spadefuls.
The exception, of course, is "Burning Down The House." The bass-line is a killer, and I've heard it "appropriated" in a recent song. (Since I don't listen much to contemporary stuff, I doubt that I'll ever identify it.) I've listened to this track a number of times on the Pono. Masterful work by both Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison. The conventional wisdom was that the Talking Heads were just a David Byrne backup band, but this track proves that it most assuredly was not.
("Popsicle," an outtake from this album, also beats much of the actual album, by virtue of being an actual song, and not a pastiche.)
