David Byrne’s American Utopia, launched in 2018 as a resistance manifesto and rallying cry through the first Trump administration, was as formidable as its title. Starting as a songwriting reunion along with his previous associate 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 space between the illustrious promise of the US and its benighted actuality.
Arriving in spite of everything that commotion, Who Is the Sky? seems like a sigh of reduction, an exhale after such a gargantuan endeavor. The 2 albums, so completely different in really feel, derive from the identical premise: Pleasure is valuable within the twenty first century, so it’s value celebrating the explanations to be cheerful. That phrase, lifted from an previous new-wave hit from Ian Dury & the Blockheads, is the identify of Byrne’s ongoing cross-platform positivity venture, a sort 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 high-quality one.
Byrne actually 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 formidable 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 supposed 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 Types 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 offers Byrne the liberty to reside loud, pushing his eccentricities to the intense, a shift that’s evident the second “Everyone Laughs” launches the album on a word of aggressive happiness. Yelping a laundry record of banal universals (“Everyone laughs and all people cries/Everyone lives and all people dies”), Byrne appears like an over-caffeinated busker determined to get passersby to affix the social gathering. His zeal steamrolls any trace of the darker facet of human nature (“Everyone is aware of what all people does”), as does the zest of Ghost Prepare Orchestra: They’re all clashing major colours.
