Brian Eno. David Byrne. Say those names and people rejoice. While their names will never get the same widespread adoration as the living Bonos and the dead Cobains will, they are no less respected and important. Besides, Bono’s band is currently in a bland funk and Cobain ain’t raising from the dead anytime soon, so even though it’s been more than two decades since these two have collaborated, at least they’re still working and working well.
1981’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was always easier to admire and revere from a distance; the sort of effort that many call great even though it’s spun on much rarer occasion as most Eno solo and Talking Heads LPs. With Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, though, it’s a much different story. In construction, they eschewed close collaboration for the sort of back-and-forth deliveries that made the Postal Service’s Give Up partnership such a fine product—the best of Dntel and Death Cab without the aimless noodling of the former and the occasional over-reliance on swoony vocals and paeanic balladry of the latter. Likewise, Everything benefits from the warmth and pop basics of Byrne with the more clinical and experimental distancing of Eno’s canon. The results are a left turn from Ghosts—this is ultra-catchy stuff.
From the opening moment, we know that it’s going to be a different experience. The first note we hear comes from an acoustic guitar, the polar opposite of Eno’s electronic bread-and-butter. But immediately after we feel the pulse of the machine that will drive later tracks. As opener “Home” expands, we realize that Eno is inviting us in. And as we effortlessly move from “Home” into the more efficient “My Big Nurse” we suspect something special might happen.
Then we reach “I Feel My Stuff” and “Eveything That Happens,” two back-to-back tracks that sound almost nothing alike. The former begins with pianos and becomes an epic, semi-industrial stomp with vocals that alternately echo and clack away with staccato precision. But “Everything That Happens” is almost gospel-ish with its distant melodic pattern floating high in the sky like a chorus from the heavens and vocals that build upon each other until the final refrain is delivered in the same framing as an entire choir. Neither song is truly great (the spoken word stuff on “Stuff” is too staged and bizarre; “Everything” lacks a remarkable hook to make it memorable) but even when Eno and Byrne stumble a bit, they make the mistake both slight and forgivable.
The mélange of the warm, emotional pop and the processed rhythms of electronic music continues throughout the record. In what might be the album’s finest moment, “Strange Overtones” evokes the finest inclination of both giants the way Postal Service did. “Strange overtones in the music you are playing/We’re not alone; it is strong and you are tough/But a heart is not enough”—it’s a song about writing a song, specifically about the two worlds they inhabit. As Byrne himself said: “It's quite easy to make just digital music and it's quite easy to make just human music, but to try and make a combination is sort of, exciting, I think.” “Overtones” is also the album’s first single, so obviously I think they chose a good one, not just as a stand alone great track but as a broad representative of the album as a whole (even if it’s also the only track not authored exclusively by Eno and Byrne; Leo Abrahams helped).
When the two work together in creating a consistently engaging sound bringing together the opposites is when the album works best. “Poor Boy,” for example, sounds like it could have been a revamped leftover from Ghosts, the closest relative to their last collaboration, but it’s also one the album’s only lesser tracks. Not so much because it’s not very good but because it’s out of place near the end of the record following exciting and accessible fluid rockers like “Wanted for Life” and “One Fine Day.” And then closer, “The Lighthouse” is essentially hook-less, but a dreamy, lilting background and the subtle way Byrne evokes the imagery of the words along with Eno’s hazy melody makes it a worthy end, if still a little out of place considering the way the second half proceeded before it.
Even though Everything That Happens Will Happen Today isn’t a groundbreaking album and almost certainly won’t be held in the same esteem as Ghosts is after almost thirty years, it’s an album that warrants replays a lot more than the other. The level of influence can’t be registered here; too many artists already ape much of Eno and Byrne from the 70s and 80s. And their melding of the “digital” and the “human” isn’t original; it’s just that these old pros can do it better than almost anyone else making music these days. Their greatest and most important years are behind them but Everything proves that they’re still viable and valuable to anyone that will listen.
TrackBack URI for this entry
