A Must Have in Any Album Collection

This is the definitive Talking Heads record. The Heads were basically art geeks from RISD in 1977. While Led Zeppelin was wowing kids from the Island at Madison Square Garden with guitar riffs and light shows (& I love Zep!), Talking Heads were singing quirky energetic songs like "PSYCHO KILLER", and "NEW FEELING," "PULLED UP," "THE GIRLS WANT TO BE WITH THE GIRLS," "DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE GOVT" and more. They played at seedy clubs like CBGB blew people away with ther nerdy hyper intensive style. This is top notch stuff. I still listen to it 25 years after I first heard it. It blows me away even now. They are fantastic live!

Fantastic debut

This is not Talking Heads' best album - fans tend to rate any one of their four subsequent studio releases - but it's definitely worth having. Quirky, poppy and slightly amateurish, it has a sound all of its own. The emphasis is squarely on David Byrne's songs, to which the band are at this stage subordinated, and the songs are pretty much uniformly great. The best known is of course Psycho Killer, a jarring and twisted number written from the point of view of a (surprise) psycho killer, but there is better fare on offer here. Don't Worry About The Government, Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town, Happy Day and Book I Read are all cheerfully deranged masterpieces; Byrne's ability to write a song in character is utilised to the full, as is his ability to explore themes that other lyricists just wouldn't think of: who else could write a line like 'some civil servants are just like my loved ones'? However, the album's crowning glory is Pulled Up, an ecstatically cheerful pop song which, in its middle eight, showcases the band's ability to 'be funky' with a sparse guitar riff, wonderful bassline and soaring tune.
But it's not perfect by any means - when Byrne runs out of decent tunes the songs fall flat on their faces because the band don't quite have the chemistry going on that they did over the next few albums. Songs like Who Is It are lightweight and throwaway, and although they're not particularly bad, I certainly wouldn't have bought the album if they were all like that. Maybe this lack of chemistry was simply because the band were entering the studio to record an album for the first time and their nerves got the better of them - certainly they had a great reputation as a live band at around the same time - but they do bring the album's star rating down a notch. But if you've bought and liked any of their albums, you should enjoy this.

Yes! it IS punk!

Some guy a few reviews ago said that "hardcore / punk fans won't find what they're looking for" here, and I disagree. I got into punk rock the backwards way (90s, then accesible 70s, then 80s, then 70s) and have only recently gotten more interested in the original New York / CBGB scene. I was "brought up" on the punk of Bad Religion, Crass, Dead Kennedys, Ramones, Sex Pistols etc. and have still found this great album and a great PUNK album. Richard Hell & the Voidoids mix punk and poetic sensibilities better than Talking Heads, but I get the feeling that was never the Heads aim. Their seminal album starts out great with "New Feeling" "Tentative Decisions" and (one of my favourites) "Love Comes to Town." Then it loses me there in the middle (ya gotta understand, I can't take long songs) but then redeems itself at the end with the long but spectacular "Psycho Killer" and "Pulled Up." Not compared to what we've come to know as punk, but compared to the rest of the album, the last two have a harder guitar sound. The rest may not have a particularly 'vicious' punk sound, but the substance is pure neurotic, on-the-edge punk.