David Byrne & Brian Eno: Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

David Byrne was a young man playing at a mid-life

crisis when he first sang "Once In A Lifetime" with Talking Heads, a song from

1980's Remain In Light—the band's third and final collaboration with Brian

Eno. Byrne is genuinely middle-aged now, and on Everything That Happens Will

Happen Today,

his first work with Eno in 27 years, it sounds as if the introspection of "Once

In A Lifetime" stopped being an academic exercise a long time ago. "The dimming

of the light makes the picture clearer," Byrne sings as the album opens,

establishing a sunset glow that shines on much of the album to come.

What follows also sounds only a little like what

listeners might expect of a renewed Eno/Byrne partnership. Their 1981 album My

Life In The Bush Of Ghosts pushed their interest in ambience, found sounds, and African

music to a beautiful extreme. But here, the only shocks come from the way the

album sticks to traditional structures and what Byrne calls a "folk-electronic-gospel

feeling" that swaps gentle ruminations for sharp edges and challenging rhythms.

It's a bit like Cheech and Chong reuniting to perform Molière.

Everything That Happens is an unexpected album,

but a stirring one nonetheless. Though uptempo tracks like "I Feel My Stuff"

sound a bit rusty around the hinges, Byrne and Eno find warmth and focus on

tracks like "One Fine Day" (a song inspired by Dave Eggers' What Is The

What)

and "Everything That Happens," which wrap the philosophizing in carefully

layered instrumentation and soaring choruses that make the album feel like an

alternate route to the same destination. They even manage a half-reprise of "Once

In A Lifetime" with "The River," whose lyrics find Byrne beginning as a singer

in a restaurant, getting carried away by rising waters, then getting reborn on

the same stage. Same as it ever was.