Talking Heads

The title is a provocation — naming a song after one of the most canonical art-rock bands in history signals either supreme confidence or a very specific joke, and black midi's "Talking Heads" delivers something that may be both. The track moves with a compressed, stuttering urgency, the band's characteristic density applied to something that has the skeleton of a groove but refuses to stay still long enough to become one. Greep's vocals arrive as a stream of seemingly disconnected observations, delivered with the rapid-fire affect of someone narrating a disaster from inside it — precise diction, no inflection to spare, each syllable hitting its mark like a thrown object. Morgan Simpson's drumming doesn't so much keep time as interrogate it, polyrhythms layering until the downbeat becomes a theoretical concept rather than a felt pulse. What makes the track remarkable is how it manages to be simultaneously maximally chaotic and absolutely controlled — this is the sound of musicians who practice disorder the way classical players practice scales. Thematically it reads like a sharp glance at media saturation, performance, and the gap between speaking and being heard, subjects Talking Heads explored earnestly in the eighties, reprocessed here through black midi's characteristic nihilism and wit. You'd listen to this at the moment when a very large gathering has crested into something vertiginous, when the noise is too much but leaving feels impossible.