David Byrne’s American Utopia, launched in 2018 as a resistance manifesto and rallying cry in the course of the first Trump administration, was as formidable as its title. Starting as a songwriting reunion along with his outdated accomplice Brian Eno, the album ballooned right into a Broadway manufacturing that was finally captured on movie by Spike Lee.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? looks like a sigh of reduction, 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 That phrase, lifted from an outdated new-wave hit from Ian Dury & the Blockheads, is the title of Byrne’s ongoing cross-platform positivity venture, a form of Buzzfeed for relentless optimists. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think about 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 distinct beast than a day by day dose of motivation. The road between positivity and platitude is a superb one.
Byrne actually sounds tirelessly exuberant on What Is the Sky?, thanks partly to the help he receives from Ghost Practice 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 Practice Orchestra. However Who Is the Sky? shouldn’t be 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 provide 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 intense, a shift that’s evident the second “Everyone Laughs” launches the album on a word of aggressive happiness. Yelping a laundry checklist of banal universals (“Everyone laughs and all people cries/Everyone lives and all people dies”), Byrne feels like an over-caffeinated busker determined to get passersby to affix the celebration. 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 Practice Orchestra: They’re all clashing main colours.
