Stop Making Sense

It may constitute the soundtrack to one of the most technically impressive concert films ever made, but once it's divorced from its constituent visuals, Stop Making Sense falls fairly flat as a document of Talking Heads' musical abilities.

It would be unwise, though, to treat Stop Making Sense as anything resembling a greatest hits collection. We've already had that with 1993's Sand In The Vaseline, anyway, and given the time at which Stop Making Sense was recorded (December 1983), many of Talking Heads' biggest songs are absent (no 'Road To Nowhere', no 'And She Was', et cetera).

Instead, it captures the band at a halfway house between the neurotic kitsch and white funk of the Remain In Light/Fear Of Music days, and the later forays into off-kilter pop during the mid-1980s, on Little Creatures and Naked.

As a consequence, we get "treated" to the likes of 'Making Flippy Floppy', 'Slippery People', 'Found A Job', the awful 'Swamp' and a misguided cover of Al Green's 'Take Me To The River'. In particular, the decision to include just one song, 'Crosseyed And Painless', from the seminal Remain In Light is criminal.

No album featuring sixteen songs from the Talking Heads back catalogue could ever be a complete stinker, though. The opening 'Psycho Killer', on which Byrne's vocal performance possibly even eclipses the famous original, is probably the pick of the bunch. The rendition of 'Burning Down The House', conversely, is near identical to the studio version, but is still worth hearing again after the recent atrocities visited upon it by Tom Jones and the Cardigans.

The major disappointment is Tina Harrison's and Chris Frantz's 'Genius Of Love', which they released under the Tom Tom Club alias, and which loses much of its loose-limbed funkiness due to the sorely dated drum sound on this recording.

At a wildly overlong 74 minutes, what shines through on Stop Making Sense is Talking Heads' biggest flaw as a musical unit: their infuriating tendency to play six notes when two would have done, to faff about inconsequentially instead of opting for the simple direct hit.

The CD booklet's liner notes ask: "Why do the musicians come out gradually? Are live concerts better or worse than records? Why a big suit for David? Why re-release the record?" Good questions, all of them, and after four listens to this patchy, oddly unsatisfying album, I'm still no nearer to answering any.