![]() Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. And calling it average would be grossly dishonest. Calling it bad would be missing the point. Overall, calling American Utopia a good album would be overstating it. In fact, it would be possible to listen to snippets of random songs and gain more from teasing out the minutiae of the performances and production than from listening to the tracks in their fullness. Dog’s Mind and Bullet take interesting narrative perspectives, but only the latter really exploits its viewpoint to full effect.Īmerican Utopia succeeds as an album in that it is remarkably easy to listen to in its entirety, yet somehow the individual songs don’t really stand on their own – lead single, Everybody’s Coming to My House, being an exception. Gasoline and Dirty Sheets offers an askew glance at politics and consumerism, but if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the second song on the record it would go unnoticed as the album rushes through its thirty-seven-minute runtime. It is an interesting juxtaposition that sideswipes the listener. Opening number, I Dance Like This, sees Byrne drag his lacklustre vocal performance over a pretty but insubstantial keyboard melody, and it is the semi-industrial electronic beats of the chorus that drives the track’s intrigue. But for all the grand ideas that inform the album’s conception, and considerable talents of its creators, American Utopia isn’t an especially memorable album. So Byrne isn’t going it alone when he attempts to tackle the big ideas, and with that pedigree, American Utopia was never in danger of becoming a forgettable, bland record. While American Utopia is billed as a solo album from Byrne, Brian Eno is listed as a co-writer on eight of the ten tracks – and he is a performer on half of those – and the Brooklyn-based experimental electronic music producer/composer Daniel Lopatin – also known as Oneohtrix Point Never – is the co-writer on the other two songs. Among this gloominess Byrne wants us all to find reasons to be cheerful, and so his latest album, American Utopia, is a musical component of his Reasons to Be Cheerful project. Yet despite this growing sense of alienation from “the other”, Talking Heads front-man David Byrne wants all sides to recognise that the news makes us all feel like the world is falling apart, and in that lies a common humanity. While there have been over a dozen others that followed, The Streets of This Town, newly remastered and remixed for this reissue, remains one of Steve Forbert’s finest recorded moments.In a world where political divisions run deep, where social media echo-chambers and internet algorithms seem only to reinforce each side’s prejudices and preconceptions, the gulf between the “us” and the “them” can seem to be an unbridgeable chasm. But like the best, most resilient albums, it sounds as fresh today as when it was released 30-plus years ago. This ultimately didn’t return Forbert to past glories. It’s as potent as anything else and well worth hearing for fans. Forbert’s committed, emotional vocals can sell even the weakest lyrics, something he doesn’t need to be concerned about with performances as dependable as the ones here. An extra tune, added for this reissue, is “They’re Out to Break Us,” another title that can refer to his business problems or romantic ones. One of those is the lovely “Search Your Heart” that floats along on sweet words of Forbert telling a lover things will get better If you search your heart / You’ll ease your mind over clear repeated guitar chords. Most tracks follow a mid-tempo strummy blueprint, but some veer off into more sentimental territory.
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