The presence of Eno is felt more strongly on this album, from the Afrobeat nature of album opener I Zimbra, through the various quirky beats and sounds. Robert Fripp is credited with guitar as well – he's on I Zimbra, it’s not clear if he’s elsewhere. The track Heaven certainly bears a resemblance to Bowie’s Heroes, a gloriously lush tune that stands out amid the usual New Wave quirkiness, with Weymouth and Frantz providing funk-adjacent backing.
Byrne’s apparent fear of the natural world is present throughout the album – I think he likes cities, but I don’t know how much he really fears nature. Animals is a fun bit of insanity sung in an even more exaggerated style than normal as the paranoid narrator relates that “I know the animals are laughing at us, don't even know what a joke is”. Air, meanwhile, tells of how “Air can hurt you too”; replace “air” with “love” and the song becomes surprisingly mundane in meaning. With the metaphor present it’s typical left-field stuff from Byrne.
For me, the mix was a little bit flat, although that could be the headphones I was using –my earpods tend to be better. Byrne’s voice and the rhythm couple got a bit lost in the mix and both would have been better if picked out a bit more. The only track on here I’d heard before is Life During Wartime, which felt like one of the best tracks on the album – I can’t tell if that’s merely familiarity or not. It’s a bouncing track about a man prepping for surviving a hostile word with enough peanut butter to last two weeks. Read one way, it may not be during an actual war, but that the narrator is simply fearful of the modern world – the ambiguity in Byrne’s songs are part of their charm.
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