Also available with TALKING HEADS ’77 on 1 cassette. Talking Heads: David Byrne (vocals, guitar, percussion); Jerry Harrison (guitar, keyboards, background vocals); Tina Weymouth (bass, background vocals); Chris Frantz (drums, percussion). Additional personnel: Brian Eno (various instruments, background vocals). Recorded at Compass Point Studio, New Providence, The Bahamas in March and April 1978. The Heads’ second album found them building on the twitchy “new wave” sound they established with their debut while using that approach as a springboard for new lyrical and musical innovations. The band’s sonic pallette is a bit wider here; the interplay between the guitars of David Byrne and Jerry Harrison is more fully developed here, are Harrison’s keyboard contributions (he was, after all, strictly a keys man in the Modern Lovers, one of the Heads’ primary influences). The band displays diversity with their first recorded cover tune, Al Green’s “Take Me To The River,” which they redefine with an ominous, supple sensuality. While Byrne still sounds like his nerves are being stretched to the breaking point, the band is a little looser here, as on the jumpy, Velvet Underground-ish “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel.” Byrne’s hyper-intellectualism is in full flower on BUILDINGS, from the gender politics lesson “The Girls Want to Be With the Girls” to the New York bohemian slant of “Artists Only,” whose key phrase is “you can’t see it till it’s finished!”
