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With the faint air of Hell freezing over, the long-estranged former members of Talking Heads put three decades of bitter post-divorce acrimony on pause last September, painting on their best smiles to jointly promote the remastered 40th anniversary reissue of their seminal concert movie Stop Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demme. Initially re-released last year, this expanded soundtrack album is now back in deluxe double vinyl, CD and Blu-ray formats, sounding super-crisp and box-fresh in digitally tweaked audio.
While both film and album will be familiar to even casual Talking Heads fans, this shiny time capsule of a brilliant avant-rock band embracing mainstream pop success with wit, style, arty attitude and groove-heavy swagger can still floor you.
David Byrne's solo beatbox/guitar take on Psycho Killer and jangly stripped-down setting of the achingly beautiful Heaven became the definitive versions of those songs, while the expanded full-band gallop through Burning Down The House and Girlfriend Is Better are gloriously effusive disco-funk anthems.
Last year's deluxe reissue finally restored two cuts missing from both the original film and previous album releases, the best being a lean, spy, springy version of deadpan new wave urban travelogue Cities. The conjoined blend of Byrne's solo track Big Business, taken from his 1981 score album for Twyla Tharp's ballet project The Catherine Wheel, with the Fear of Music track I Zimbra is an interesting pairing, but it leans more into a tightly wound, monochrome punk-funk aesthetic than the rest of this loose-limbed, brightly coloured, partly-friendly setlist. Not quite a perfect live album, but pretty damn close.
