Review: David Byrne at Metropolis
He could have sung Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody, as he did in his last Montreal visit, and it would have sounded great. But he did not. He sang (mostly) songs by David Byrne and Brian Eno - a partnership that dates back some 30 years, including the pair's latest collaboration, the new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. It's an evocative work, marked by Eno's warm, playful music and Byrne's poetic, thought-provoking lyrics and vocals. That interplay was on display as of the first song of the night, the groovy Strange Overtones. Immediate impressions: The quivering emotion in Byrne's voice; his shock of white hair, matched by the all-white wardrobe sported by him, his four-piece band, three backup singers, and the three modern dancers who joined one song later. Yes, modern dancers. In 13 years of covering concerts, I have never seen a rock artist use modern dancers. Never mind that he did so without coming off the least bit pretentious. To the contrary, the dancers loosened up the vibe - moving microphones around, engaging with the singers and Byrne, busting silly moves alongside impressive ones, and smiling all the way. Byrne's infuence was at work. As forward-thinking and avant-garde as he (and in this case, he and Eno) has always been, he has never been above his audience. There is always an accessibility and a warmth to his music, as there was to this entire show. He delivered familiar, engaging yelps on the funky, African-influenced Help Me Somebody, a song from his and Eno's 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - a delivery style that returned later when he performed the Talking Heads classic Once In a Lifetime. He toyed with the song's timeless existentialist /materialist queries, chirping his lines with renewed inspiration. Life During Wartime, next, was equally electrifying. But those were mere exclamation marks on an evening that had taken us far and wide. From the soft-sung ironies of the new song Home ("with the neighbours fighting... always so exciting) to the social malaise of the Talking Heads songs Crosseyed and Painless (which included knock-knee'd dance moves and a fiery guitar solo by Byrne). The encore brought a straight-up, and seriously groovy Take Me to the River. The second encore brought Burning Down the House - which brought down the house, with Byrne running backwards about the stage. And in the third and final encore came the new album's hymn-like title track. As Byrne sang the lines, "Nothing has changed, but nothing's the same / and every tomorrow could be yesterday," time compressed, and stretched - and a great artist proved himself immune to its effects.
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The theme to the night was "David Byrne plays songs by David Byrne and Brian Eno." But while Eno's influence could be traced through the evening's repertoire, it was Byrne's enchanting, understated charisma and effortless artistic grace that stole the show.