David Byrne: Who Is the Sky? evaluation – nice songs, in the event you can face up to the wacky jokes and miaowing | Music

It is seven years since David Byrne launched his final solo album, American Utopia. So a lot has occurred within the intervening interval that it’s simple to neglect that, initially, the document acquired a combined response. There was reward for its expansive and experimental strategy: songs constructed on rhythms by Brian Eno have been handed over to a big selection of producers to tinker with, then Byrne compiled the completed product. Part of a bigger multimedia undertaking referred to as Reasons to Be Cheerful, it tried to engender a spirit of positivity, however there have been complaints that this amounted to a blithe abdication of accountability amid the primary Trump presidency. Respectful long-service-medal evaluations coexisted with offended fulminating over the whole absence of feminine contributors.

A combined response was enterprise as standard so far as Byrne’s post-Talking Heads profession is anxious. He’s pursued an idiosyncratic path – diversions into Latin American music, opera and trip-hop, collaborations with dance producers and St Vincent – however by no means with outcomes that achieved enough acclaim or business success to overshadow his former band. But then, one thing bizarre occurred. The ensuing American Utopia stay reveals, which used cutting-edge know-how and choreography to demolish the conventions of a rock present, attracted deserved hyperventilating reward. A tour that started taking part in modest theatres wound up filling arenas, spawning a Broadway present, two stay albums – one named after a critic’s breathless assertion that it was The Best Live Show of All Time – and a Spike Lee-directed film.

So Byrne arrives at Who Is the Sky? together with his inventory larger than at any level within the final 35 years. It abandons American Utopia’s patchwork strategy for a extra simple type of collaboration, the entire album recorded with Brooklyn’s 12-piece Ghost Train Orchestra and Harry Styles producer Kid Harpoon. But its raison d’être stays basically the identical: extra primary-coloured musical optimism, to which finish it variously employs Mariachi-style brass (What Is the Reason for It?), sweeping 40s-Hollywood-musical strings (A Door Called No), rhythms that be part of the dots between Cuban clave and George Michael’s Faith (Don’t Be Like That) and an off-kilter, vocoder-bedecked tackle the luxurious soul of former Byrne collaborator Thom Bell on I’m an Outsider.

Thus far, 2025 has proved so unremittingly grim that it makes 2018 look like a lost sunlit nirvana: you can understand why Byrne thinks the world needs positivity and uplift, and Who Is the Sky? frequently sounds fantastic. The arrangements are superb, particularly when driven by the woody thwack of double bass. The songs are often melodically strong. The climax of Everybody Laughs, with the voices of Byrne and St Vincent belting out over a marimba-speckled backdrop, is suitably joyous, as are the key shifts in closer The Truth. When We Are Singing’s blend of an oddly (and one suspects unwittingly) Oasis-esque guitar line with a chugging funk rhythm really works, although it’s debatable whether it strictly needed the sound of Byrne’s miaowing extempore vocals.

The sound of Byrne mewing like a cat highlights the album’s major drawback. The lyrical tone tends to jokiness, which is fine when the jokes are funny. Moisturizing Thing concerns an anti-ageing cream that works so well, it leaves the protagonist looking like a three-year-old, plagued by people talking as if he’s a toddler and constant demands for ID in bars. Or when they carry a certain potent undertow: the man singing an impassioned love song to his flat on My Apartment Is My Friend could easily be an isolated shut-in; the character bamboozled by his partner’s knowledge and understanding of films, literature and human nature in She Explains Things to Me seems suggestive of Byrne’s self-diagnosed autism.

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Otherwise, as on I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party, or The Avant Garde, they carry the awkward, faintly irritating feeling of someone trying a bit too hard to leaven the mood. Similarly, the tone of optimism can seem too pat and Pollyanna-ish without a hint of darkness. To the latter end, you could hear The Truth as a paean to love or an acknowledgment that the titular concept seems increasingly malleable in a world of disinformation and manipulation: “The truth cannot hurt me, I know what I know.” When We Are Singing at the least acknowledges the pallid state of issues – “we’ve got one foot in the pearly gates and one foot in the flames” – whereas it’s hymning music’s transportive energy.

It’s onerous to not have combined emotions about Who Is the Sky?: enterprise as standard. But maybe it’s price retaining American Utopia in thoughts. Byrne has urged his forthcoming tour will mix “visual art, storytelling and music into one compelling live performance”. Given what occurred final time round – a superb album elevated to greatness on stage – that sounds intriguing: a purpose to be suitably optimistic.

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