Love This Giant | A melding of two minds

Richard DiCicco
Staff Writer

David Byrne and St. Vincent
“Love This Giant”
4AD | Todo Mondo record label
Grade | B+

Say it out loud: “David Byrne and St. Vincent.” Let it sink in. On paper, this collaboration could not seem more lopsided, but the two artists actually fit together much better than expected.

Taking even a cursory glance back at their respective discographies reveals an obvious link between David Byrne and Annie Clark, St. Vincent’s sole songwriter and front woman. Byrne’s legendary run with the Talking Heads in the 1970s and ’80s, where he merged punk with funk, tribal music, minimalism and New York avant-garde, set the stage for artists like Miss Clark to liberally play with the rules of pop music. Like Byrne, Clark packs a symphonic range of dynamism into every song she writes and manages to retain that crucial 3 to 5 minute running time.

“Love This Giant” is the result of Byrne and Clark’s deep musical connection and it shows brilliantly, almost erasing the wide age gap between the two artists in the mind of the listener.

The album most certainly has its own distinct voice – not quite as stiff as David Byrne’s work but more driving and rhythmic than Annie Clark’s lush chamber pop – and this helps to displace the record from the more idiosyncratic work of either musician.

The first half of the record shakes and shimmies around, drawing heavily from funk and early New Wave. As singers, Clark and Byrne mesh beautifully, and the mix of traditional rock instruments with brass and woodwinds really lets the compositions breathe. While “Love This Giant” is very energetic and excited (even fun, let’s be honest), the wonky drum machines and ever-present horns begin to grow a bit monotonous halfway through.

Thankfully, the record opens up around the tracks “Lazarus” and “Optimist,” where the rigid funk of the album loosens and allows the songs to billow and build patiently, rather than jitter all over the place. It never loses its pace though. This is a well-structured and wisely-crafted pop record. The album’s untraditional and fragmentary composition sees each song shape-shift and transform in wild and captivating ways.

However, I cannot talk about “Love This Giant” without discussing the infamous horns. Perhaps the record’s most important musical element, every single track of the album prominently features brass of all kinds.

Admittedly, I found the horns to be somewhat taxing to endure. The brass certainly has character, but it only tends to express itself as weird and obtuse. Nevertheless, they serve a practical purpose: they help to give these two artists a common ground, running a sonic thread throughout the record that helps to unite the disparate tracks.

“Love This Giant” is far better than I anticipated and is one of my favorite surprises of 2012. However, though it feels like a labor of love, it lacks the power of either David Byrne or Annie Clark’s individual work. It’s a fantastic footnote, though.