David Byrne’s American Utopia, launched in 2018 as a resistance manifesto and rallying cry throughout the first Trump administration, was as bold as its title. Starting as a songwriting reunion along with his previous accomplice Brian Eno, the album ballooned right into a Broadway manufacturing that was ultimately captured on movie by Spike Lee. Each iteration and star collaboration positioned American Utopia as a serious assertion, a reckoning with the gap between the illustrious promise of the US and its benighted actuality.
Arriving in spite of everything that commotion, Who Is the Sky? appears like a sigh of aid, an exhale after such a gargantuan endeavor. The 2 albums, so totally different in really feel, derive from the identical premise: Pleasure is valuable within the twenty first century, so it’s price celebrating the explanations to be cheerful. That phrase, lifted from an previous new-wave hit from Ian Dury & the Blockheads, is the title of Byrne’s ongoing cross-platform positivity mission, a form of Buzzfeed for relentless optimists. It wouldn’t be a stretch to contemplate What Is the Sky? an extension of that publication: These songs are designed to assist get you thru the day—vivid, colourful tunes that place a premium on human interplay. However an album is a unique beast than a every day dose of motivation. The road between positivity and platitude is a wonderful one.
Byrne definitely sounds tirelessly exuberant on What Is the Sky?, thanks partly to the help he receives from Ghost Prepare Orchestra, a freewheeling ensemble that’s no stranger to bold undertakings. Previous to teaming with Byrne, the collective launched a tribute to visionary polymath Moondog, carried out in collaboration with avant-classical veterans Kronos Quartet. If any group can navigate Byrne’s buoyant polyrhythms and sly stylistic shifts, it’s Ghost Prepare Orchestra. However Who Is the Sky? just isn’t meant as excessive artwork: It’s designed to be a bustling pop album, so Byrne has introduced in producer Child Harpoon—a British musician who’s helped Harry Kinds and Miley Cyrus take house Grammys—to produce the requisite pizzazz.
Don’t take Child Harpoon’s presence, or the cameo from Paramore’s Hayley Williams on the galloping “What Is the Cause for It?,” as an indication that Byrne is tempering his eccentricities in hopes of reaching a broader viewers. Child Harpoon’s glowing manufacturing provides Byrne the liberty to stay loud, pushing his eccentricities to the acute, a shift that’s evident the second “All people Laughs” launches the album on a observe of aggressive happiness. Yelping a laundry listing of banal universals (“All people laughs and everyone cries/All people lives and everyone dies”), Byrne appears like an over-caffeinated busker determined to get passersby to affix the get together. His zeal steamrolls any trace of the darker aspect of human nature (“All people is aware of what everyone does”), as does the zest of Ghost Prepare Orchestra: They’re all clashing main colours.
