These eight songs do not so much resemble songs, inasmuch as they don't really have choruses, verses, chord changes or any commercial leanings whatsoever. Refusing to be pigeonholed into a genre - at a time when that's all most bands were doing - the band fused pop, funk, African rhythms and a sense of the bizarre European eclectic to create a wholly original album.

Typically, musings on life occur underneath strummed acoustic guitars and stark production, with Dylan and Van Morrison's stream-of-consciousness rants leading that genre. But David Byrne took his nerdy paranoid musings and matched them to equally paranoid music, songs that you can dance to or space out to with the lights dimmed. It's the personal singer/songwriter album of the new wave "me" generation.

Each of the songs is basically one long groove, never really shifting in mood or dynamics, with various guitar squalls, keyboard feedbacks and Bryne's distant chants or vocals finishing the scene. A couple of times, this approaches something resembling pop: "Crosseyed And Painless" is an unrelenting five-minute white funk workout, similar to what David Bowie was doing at the time, but the song is firmly a Talking Heads tune because of Adrian Belew's angular, white-noise guitar solos. Over top of the seven kinds of percussion and the interlocking rhythms that somehow create a whole, Byrne intones "Facts lost / Facts are never what they seem to be / Nothing there! / No information left of any kind / Lifting my head / Looking for danger signs."

Byrne really is one of the most paranoid singers in rock, each of his spoken words having a jerky omnipotent quality, but when he sings be lends a more charismatic air to the proceedings. In some cases he can play the rock singer game, as on "The Great Curve," a hard-driving kinetic groove layered with Byrne's vocals (including the immortal pronouncement "The world moves on a woman's hips / The world moves and it swivels and bops"). Rarely has African music, funk music and pop been synthesized so well.

Remain In Light foreshadows both King Crimson (which Adrian Belew would join in 1981, probably based on this release alone) and Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel's more low-key worldbeat discs later in the decade. But where those sounded pretentious and studied, this is organic and way ahead of its time; the closing "The Overload," for example, is a funeral dirge that predates Tool by at least 15 years.

And through the haze cuts Byrne's off-kilter voice, a detached narrator who has no idea what's going on and questions everything, whether telling the displacement immigration story in "Listening Wind" or the sarcastic self-help book reading in "Seen And Not Seen," with lines like "Or maybe they imagined that their personality would be forced to change to fit the new appearance / This is why first impressions are often correct."

As weird and complex as this music is, as avant-garde as pop ever gets, it all gels together on the band's finest hour, "Once In A Lifetime." As a driving Tina Weymouth bassline ascends and descends behind flowing-water keyboards, Byrne questions the point of achieving material things in life and the realization of waking up one day to a beautiful house, beautiful wife and nice car and realizing that's not what one wants. The searching, detached choruses are alternated with soaring, hopeful verses about being washed away from a trapped and empty life ("Letting the days go by / water flowing underground / Into the blue again / after the money's gone / Once in a lifetime / water flowing underground." The closing repetition of "Same as it ever was" ends the song on an upbeat but somewhat unsettling note.

"Once In A Lifetime" is one of the best singles of the decade, and it comes from one of the most challenging and interesting albums of the decade. The lack of musical dynamics takes some getting used to, and a couple of the songs ("Seen And Not Seen," mostly) don't go anywhere, but the rest of this is well worth the time it takes to understand it.

Rating: A-

User Rating: B+

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