The Heads Are Rolling

By JAY COCKS

Talking Heads is a band of high repute and wide recognition still looking for one of those bring-'em-to-their-knees commercial breakthroughs. The Heads are spoiling for it, in fact, on evidence of their sprightly and acidic new album Little Creatures, a collection of nine nifty, looney tunes that seem calculated to loft them out of their cerebral groove right onto the main highway. Time for everyone to hitch a ride.

The Heads have had their odd successes since their first album was released in 1977. Any prosperity this band enjoyed would have to be odd, since the music it makes, fractured and rhythmic and inventive, touches amusingly on endless varieties of weirdness. Starting out, the nucleus of the band formed in Providence in 1974, when Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, students at the Rhode Island School of Design, fell in with David Byrne, occasional student and otherworldly wit. Moving a couple of hundred miles south, and joining up with Keyboard Player Jerry Harrison, they became the premier house band for New York City's young artistic community. Artist Robert Longo even inserted a life-size cutout of Byrne, the group's lead singer and driving force, into a construction called Heads Will Roll. "Neo-expressionism" was the buzz word for this kind of art, and, for a while, it might have been carpentered onto the Heads' music as well. African rhythm stacked up against Motown, and 42nd Street funk against the ozone background musings of Rock Minimalist Brian Eno, all set under lyric passages that seemed like exercises in concretist hysteria. Byrne cooked up a homicidal maniac who talked to himself in French. "Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est" was the refrain of the first big- time song he ever wrote. Funny and frightening, it set the band off on a nicely twisted track.

Audiences outside the artistic ghetto required a little more conditioning to this kind of dementia, and it was film and video that set the Heads up without settling them down. Byrne, who writes most of the group's material, helped work up two videos, Once in a Lifetime and Burning Down the House, that cut straight through the dross on MTV. They were innovative and gratifyingly out of place. In a program of other rock videos, they looked as if Robert Wilson, en route to Einstein on the Beach, had opened the wrong studio door and stumbled onto Soul Train. It was, however, the release of a superb 1984 performance documentary movie, Stop Making Sense, and a sound-track album that marked the band's biggest breakthrough so far. Talk about psycho killers. Byrne showed up in his humongous, gleaming, wide-shouldered white suit, did a fancy two-step with a floor lamp, and the band played all its best-known tunes. Byrne may have looked, at first, like Anthony Perkins getting ready to swab the bathroom floor at the Bates Motel, but his brilliant performance made manifest all the deadpan comedy and everyday eeriness of the music. At last, everything was clear. Besides, the lead singer ended up being as endearing as the Qantas koala.

The melodies on Little Creatures, released a couple of months ago and cruising into the upper regions of the charts, are all smooth sailing. Eric Weissberg, of Dueling Banjos fame, even puts in a guest appearance, playing a steel guitar on Creatures of Love that makes it sound like an Eagles tune. There is a Cajun accordion on Road to Nowhere and enough unashamed tunesmithing all around to set toes to tapping and get the Top 40 a little loosened up.

Almost. The record begins with And She Was, about a woman who levitates above her backyard and propels herself off into the universe, a voyage that is presented with no more wonderment than a trip down to the 7-Eleven. Road to Nowhere, which ends the second side, has the title of a Sunday sermon and the rhythm of an Acadian barn dance but turns out to be an unabashed paean to nihilism: "Well we know where we're goin'/ But we don't know where we've been/ And we know what we're knowin'/ But we can't say what we've seen . . . We're on a road to nowhere/ Come on inside."

The record sounds like sunshine and turns out to be a tonic rebuke to solid values and positive thinking. "Well, I've seen sex and I think it's okay" goes the unsolicited but unimpassioned testimonial in Creatures of Love, one of two songs on the album that are about children. Like the visionary folk art that decorates the record sleeve, these two tunes about little ones impart a deceptively cozy air that is undercut with a keen sardonic edge. "We are . . . creatures of love/ From the sleep of reason" is the way the refrain runs, and Little Creatures becomes an extended lullaby for rationality. This may not guarantee the record a lingering chart life, but it is rock at its most enterprising and numinous.