DAVID BYRNE & BRIAN ENO : EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY

1. Home
2. My Big Nurse
3. I Feel My Stuff
4. Everything That Happens
5. Life Is Long
6. The River
7. Strange Overtones
8. Wanted For Life
9. One Fine Day
10. Poor Boy
11. The Lighthouse

Label : Todomundo

Release Date : August 18, 2008

Length : 47:00

Review (AllMusic) : The musical reunion between David Byrne and Brian Eno comes with a fair amount of baggage. After all, they produced some of the greatest records in rock history: the trio of Talking Heads records that Eno worked on, culminating in Remain in Light, and followed by the duo's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, where all manner of Afro-funky beats and freaky sampladelic rhythms were wedded to Pentecostal exorcisms and ceremonial bush chants. Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is a nearly 180-degree turn from the duo's collective musical past. These 11 songs are loopy pop tunes that wed Byrne's strange hearing of gospel and folk to Eno's continually evolving rhythmic and electronic palette - they refer to it as "folk-electronic-gospel." Granted, Eno's compositional frameworks are all written in major keys, and Byrne's poetically funny, sophisticated lyrics express possibility and hope in the middle of cultural darkness, but while it's clear that the emotional component is shared between the two principals, this is far from "message" music. The set opens with "Home." Strummed acoustic guitars and drum loops textured by sonic wonkery introduce an elegantly simple melody where Byrne, at his full-throated best, sings: "The dimming of the light/Makes the picture clearer...I memorized a face so it's not forgotten...Come back anytime/And we'll mix our lives together/Heaven knows what keeps mankind alive/Every hand - goes searching for its partner in crime." Brokenness and paradox are also addressed: "Home where my world is breaking in two/Home with the neighbors fighting/Home - were my parents telling the truth?" Likewise, the title track - with its warm, liquid guitars, out-of-the-ether sonic architecture, and Byrne's lyric coming from both dream and reflection - is slower and less jaunty, but poetically moving: "Oh my brother, I still wonder, are you all right/And among the living, we are giving/All through the night...." The backing choral voices give the track its "church" feel, but the message is more human and existential than divinely inspired. Another winner is "Life Is Long," which evokes remembrance as the continuation of the chain of human events. Its horn section touches on soul and rhythm & blues, but is blanched and diluted wonderfully. The only track that consciously attempts the rhythmic complexity of anything on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is "Poor Boy," which is cosmic science-fiction white-boy funk at its best. It's a warning against following the established order and rampant, empty materialism for their own sake - its guitar riff comes straight from the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar." Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is, despite the long odds, an inviting, musically satisfying endeavor. It reveals that veteran artists are capable of redefining themselves when refusing to take themselves too seriously. This is unfettered joyful listening.

Review (Pitchfork) : There's nothing like a nice surprise from musicians you love. In 1981, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno united for one of the most fruitful partnerships of the post-punk era to release My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a groundbreaking record that made prominent use of sampled soundbytes and disembodied voices in place of singing. The album, recorded between sessions for the Talking Heads' essential Remain in Light LP, was released with surprisingly little fanfare, yet pioneered and popularized methods that have since become part of our musical lexicon. Last April, Byrne revealed that the partnership would be revisited for the first time in 27 years, for another full album. But while Everything That Happens Will Happen Today reunites this iconic duo, the record shares almost nothing in common with its predecessor- down to the process. Where My Life in the Bush of Ghosts resulted from hours of close collaboration, the self-released Everything That Happens occured when Eno asked Byrne to add lyrics and vocals to a number of tracks the producer had created independently. The two began passing tapes back and forth, and then onto a series of session players and studios until the record was complete. Described by the duo as "electronic gospel," the album is a beautifully melodic, unpretentious offering- and nothing whatsoever like its predecessor. One of the first sounds here is an acoustic guitar- an early sign that this is a very different sort of album from those these two have made together in the past. The disc opens with one of its strongest songs, the expansive "Home", fitting the duo's description. Byrne sings long, drifting phrases to lyrics that temper domestic nostalgia with a bit of honesty. His outlook here is generally positive- or maybe more accurately, tinged with hope or determination: "Chain me down but I am still free," he sings on the catchy chorus to the fluid "Life Is Long", as Eno's arrangement incorporates understated brass and a wall of keyboards that burst with melody. Most of these tracks are strikingly immediate, considering the relaxed creative process that brought them to fruition. "Strange Overtones" has a great shuffling beat with a hooky bassline and a giant chorus- Byrne sings directly about the process of songwriting, mulling what a chorus should do even as he sings it. It's the kind of effortless pop song Talking Heads might be playing today if they'd stayed together. The album does have a few less satisfying moments, though, which tend to come when the easy flow of the music is disrupted. The buzzing synth hook and plodding beat of "Wanted for Life", for instance, feels somewhat out of place amid the billowing textures that surround them, and the echoey, spoken passages of "I Feel My Stuff" are plain awkward. Still, it's a welcome release from this duo- the kind of assortment that makes one hope they don't stop here. Byrne will be touring this material without Eno, but hopefully, as Eno accumulates more tracks in the future, he'll remember the off-handed brilliance of this album's best moments and pick up the phone. Whether we're talking about this record in 30 years the same way we talk about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts today is of little consequence- it's an enjoyable listen in the here and now, which is all an album has to be, even when created by giants.

Review (Rolling Stone Magazine) : David Byrne and Brian Eno retreated to pop’s periphery years ago, but their influence is suddenly front and center. There are echoes of Byrne’s old band, Talking Heads, in the avant-funk of LCD Soundsystem and other dance-rock bands, and you can hear the singer’s workaday hysteria in the cadences of Arcade Fire’s Win Butler and Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock. Coldplay sought producer Eno to help them make Viva la Vida, a record that recalls another album with Eno’s mark, U2’s The Joshua Tree. You can also hear Byrne and Eno’s world-music fusions reflected in polyglot indie bands like Vampire Weekend. With their new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the pair rejoin the rock conversation as if they’d never left. The last record Byrne and Eno made together was the groundbreaking 1981 dance-rock tape collage project, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but the duo go back further — Everything recalls the three Talking Heads records that Eno produced, played on and/or wrote: 1978’s More Songs About Buildings and Food, 1979’s Fear of Music and 1980’s Remain in Light. For those records, Eno was essentially a band member, bringing a darker, more layered and atmospheric sound to the group. Everything sounds more like a Heads record than anything Byrne’s done since the band split in 1991. A radiantly tuneful set made with sidemen, from agile, young polymath drummer Seb Rochford to Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, the album often evokes sublime, slow-to-midtempo Heads songs like “Heaven” and “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody),” as well as dreamy Eno songs like “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “I’ll Come Running.” The album was created with a fairly strict division of labor. Byrne wrote the words and sang lead. And Eno made the music, bringing an effervescent sonic gloom that adds some mystery and tension to Byrne’s plainspoken lyrics — qualities missing from much of Byrne’s solo work. “Poor Boy,” for instance, sounds like a Bush of Ghosts outtake, all percolating bass bubbles, clattering percussion and spooky vocal samples. Byrne’s words set a scene that would have appeared innocuous in 1981 but feels oddly menacing in 2008: “A truck parked this morning outside the grocery store.” Byrne has described the music as “folk electronic gospel,” openly wondering at the songs’ uplifting tone (“The Bush era was not a particularly hopeful time for many of us,” he writes in the album notes, “so where did all this exuberance and hope come from?”). And Eno has credited his ongoing interest in gospel to hearing “Surrender to His Will,” by Reverend Maceo Woods and the Christian Tabernacle Choir, way back when he was working with Talking Heads on More Songs About Buildings and Food. But this is a secular, practical sort of gospel. The opener, “Home,” finds the singer longing for a nest, even if it’s one with “neighbors fighting” and “cameras watching.” Beautifully harmonized by both men over a vigorous acoustic-guitar strum with a soaring Joshua Tree-style solo, it finds beauty and fleeting peace in spite of the ugliness. On “Everything That Happens,” Byrne coos over a morphine-drip soundscape about riding “on a perfect freeway” and savoring “the sound of someone laughing,” when suddenly he sees a car explode. “Strange Overtones” is wistful dance-floor nostalgia, with a groove that recalls GeorgeMcCrae’s 1974 hit “Rock Your Baby.” “My Big Nurse” is a gentle country tune with a narrator who’s obsessed with dancing “on this lazy afternoon” amid fellow humans who are “in love with war.” Ultimately, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is about how music heals even if it can’t cure. On “The River,” amid clapboard-church vocal harmonies, Byrne declares, “A change is gonna come/Like Sam Cooke sang in ’63.” Maybe it will. But what seems important here is the collective hope for it, channeled in song by a couple of old visionaries whose music should continue to inspire young bands and the rest of us.