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DAVID BYRNE : LIVE FROM AUSTIN TX |
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Label : New West Venue : Austin City Limits Studio, Austin, Texas, USA Recording Date : November 28, 2001 Release Date : October 2, 2007 Length : 62:40 Review (Wikipedia) : Live from Austin, Texas is a live album released by rock musician David Byrne, released on New West Records on October 2, 2007 on CD and DVD. The songs were recorded during Byrne's 2001 tour in support of Look into the Eyeball at a date for the KLRU television show Austin City Limits. Except for the first 4 songs the quartet was accompanied by the Austin-based tango string sextet Tosca. The album not only includes songs from his solo work, but also several Talking Heads songs and a Whitney Houston cover, "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)." Review (AllMusic) : David Byrne is a man of many musical faces, but he's also a show biz pro, and while he's followed a number of musical paths over the course of his solo career, in concert he's shrewd enough to know he needs to give his audience (or at least a large portion of them) what they came to see -- namely, the songs he helped write while he was in Talking Heads. On Live from Austin, Texas, an album drawn from a set Byrne played on the PBS music series Austin City Limits in the fall of 2001, demonstrates how he can have his cake and eat it too - while five of the thirteen tunes here come from his tenure with Talking Heads (and one is drawn from The Catherine Wheel, a solo project recorded while he was still with the band), he's reconfigured them to lean towards his fascination with world music while still holding on to the melodic structures folks remember him for. Roughly half the songs on Live from Austin, Texas also feature a string section including members of Tosca String Quartet, who add a fresh set of tonal colors to "This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)" and "Life During Wartime," though the ensemble really gets their chance to shine on "The Revolution" (from Look into the Eyeball, the album Byrne was promoting at the time). While he sounds a shade more enthusiastic on his more recent solo material than the relative oldies in this set, overall he seems to be in a slightly subdued mood, though he rallies for his finale, a cover of Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" that's far more sincere (and effective) than you'd imagine. In all, Live from Austin, Texas isn't the crackling live showcase you might hope for from David Byrne, though he never sounds less than professional and his head is always in the game even if his heart may be somewhere else. Review (Pitchfork) : There are many ways to approach Stop Making Sense, David Byrne and Jonathan Demme's genius work of high-concept theatre-as-concert-film. On a strictly narrative level, though, the movie traces the trajectory of Byrne's character from an antisocial, cerebral stiff (the opening number "Psycho Killer") to a loosened-up revelrer dancing with abandon to the black music-- the closing Al Green cover "Take Me to the River"-- he's finally learned to embrace. To a degree, that same arc can be applied to Byrne's career itself, as a gradual process of shaking off his aloof, faux-anthropological observational style and embracing humanity, as well as his position right in the thick of it. Byrne's emotional expansiveness is mirrored in the types of music he chooses, too. At first, his passion for world music-- Fear of Music, Remain in Light, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts-- was as frigid as the skittish guitars on the band's first two records (still wondrous, but cold), but his solo efforts in particular have seen him progress toward acceptance of non-Western cultures on their own terms and, strikingly in some cases, toward assimilation. His 2001 record Look Into the Eyeball was noted by many critics at the time as being perhaps his finest solo work to date, largely due to him shaking off much of his leftover Headsian artifice. At the time, he said: "I was hit with the revelation that I was going to be much less ironic on this record than I've been on others I've done.there would be elements of humor, but overall it would be pretty straight ahead." Live From Austin TX, recently released on CD by New West after floating around the Web for a few years, is taken from Byrne's Austin City Limits performance during the Eyeball tour in late 2001, and underscores the fact that, despite most fans largely tuning out after Naked, he never stopped making good music. Here, he presents a slice of his oeuvre in a bare-bones Latin idiom, backed by a three-piece band (bass, percussion, drums), as well as Austin's wonderful string ensemble Tosca. Byrne splits the performance between old Heads material (six songs) and Eyeball songs (four) as well a track from 1989's Latin American melange Rei Momo, the Selena duet "God's Child", from the Luaka Bop-released Blue in the Face soundtrack, and Byrne's lovely cover of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", which closes the set. |