There's a sound that runs throughout "Who," the lead single off David Byrne and St. Vincent's collaborative new album Love This Giant (out September 11)—a primordial, guttural grunt… a quick "huggghhh!"… that, within the space of a moment, manages to encapsulate the wondrously strange, delightfully manic energy that flows between these two unlikely but marvelously complimentary bedfellows. Though it leans closer to Stop Making Sense than Strange Mercy in vibe, feel and arrangement, Love This Giant is its own unique little beast—a boisterously groovy series of arty little explosions, bursting with boldly woozy horns, bump-and-grind electronic beats, wiry electric guitars and the respectively engaging and enthralling Mr. Byrne and Miss Annie Clark, both sounding positively revitalized by the other's presence.
Download This: David Byrne and St. Vincent – "Who"
Though the omnipresent horns arrangements keep threatening redundancy, each song lives, breathes and freaks out in its own unique little world—focusing on the usual obsessions (nature, TV, Walt Whitman, etc.) while allowing David and Annie ample room to shake their demons and their limbs with equal abandon. The aforementioned "Who" is a disarming delight with its lilting acoustic guitar strums and drunken Tom Waits on Mars horn stabs, while the St. Vincent-led "Weekend In The Dust" struts deliciously with its saucy '90s R&B chorus and busy breakbeats. There's a playful back and forth at work, both in the exchange of ideas (the album was composed largely via e-mail using different, not always compatible versions of Logic software) and their friendly sharing of lead vocal duties—Bryne's spry, very Talking Heads-esque "I Am An Ape" makes an intriguingly artful segue into the heady wilderness of St. Vincent's "The Forest Awakes," a low mist of billowing flutes and horns and layers of her trademark vocal ethereality. On the jam-packed "The One Who Broke Your Heart," Byrne burrows under a warm blanket of fancy-free optimism ("Sing along with the one who broke your heart," he proclaims, "Sing it loud, it will keep you safe and warm") over an overpowering army of horn bursts, deftly provided by guests Antibalas and The Dap-Kings. Its feverishly exotic energies comes down nobly into the soft, funereal intro to "Outside Of Space And Time," a rare pensive moment amidst the lurching grind of analogue drum loops and majestic flutter of dizzy trumpets.
Listen Up: David Byrne and St. Vincent – "Weekend In The Dust"
There's a tangible joy running throughout Love This Giant—the giddy rush of collaboration, the exciting mutation of ideas passed through two like-minded yet distinct creative filters. Most collaborative albums lose the plot attempting to force-fuse the respective strengths of the involved parties, but Byrne and St. Vincent sound genuinely enthralled to be making any sort of noise together. They're an interesting pair, to say the least—well matched for their shared eccentricities, sure, but also for their methodical exactness, their strategic approaches to songwriting and their ineffably brilliant tendency to mine emotion out of the very process of music making: the very nuts and bolts, clashing and banging inside the tin can of their imaginations. Love This Giant is as imaginative as it is loose, no doubt, but it's also pristinely focused, sublimely calculated, divinely precise pop music from two prodigiously idiosyncratic crafts-people. It's also, to toss out the bullshit, a hell of a lot of fun to listen to. Which, at the end of the day, is the best thing you can say about it. Besides, well... "hughhh!"
Grade: A
What do you guys think of David Byrne and St. Vincent's Love This Giant? You can stream the album in its entirety over at NPR: First Listen for a limited time. Check it out and then give us your reactions in the comments section below.
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