Talking Heads

These songs were conceived for a movie, rarely an efficient way to initiate an aural experience. Yet they're real songs, not detached avant-garde atmospherics, and honest though David Byrne's sympathy may (I said may) be, they leach their vitality from traditions that demand more heart than he ordinarily coughs up. Interesting they remain. But no way the rhetorical gris-gris of "Papa Legba" or the evangelical paranoia of "Puzzlin' Evidence" or (God knows) the escapist solace of "Dream Operator" is gonna fascinate like "Crosseyed and Painless" or "Slippery People"--for one thing, Byrne lets us know what the new songs mean, which ain't much. Do they rock, you want to know? Oh yes they do. (Grade: B)