First off, I apologize to this site's readers for not having posted any reviews in a good while. I'm sure some of you may have been worried as to whether or not I'm still alive, but I assure you that I am, so there's no need to call the Ghostbusters for fear that this record review is traveling from the great beyond to appear on the electronic computor information processing device which takes up your entire kitchen. I would, however, to steal a joke from Todd Levin of Tremble.com fame, appreciate it if you would call the booty doctor, since someone just shot me in the booty.

On with the review. I just finished reading David Bowman's absorbing, pretty strangely written, biography of the Talking Heads and it's sparked my interest in re-listening to this, which sounds very ahead of its time for 1979, at least in terms of how darn strange it is. Off-kilter chord progressions, usually reliant on minor keys, make many of the songs, especially the queasy, paranoid "Air" (one interesting theory about this album is that you can place "Fear Of..." in front of each track title and receive a fairly accurate description of its subject matter; this makes it something of a humorous concept album basically about feeling, well, afraid of everything), just about unlike anything heard before or since. Contemporaries like Devo -- also produced by Brian Eno, a key figure in expanding and popularizing ambient music -- and Pere Ubu are reference points, of course, but what separated the Heads from them and the early punk bands they played with was an appreciation of funk, a healthy dose of which is supplied by the rhythm section. "Life During Wartime" is the most obvious ass-shaking example of this, but the same rhythmic ideas -- borrowed from early hip-hop and African musicians like Fela Kuti -- are taken into different areas on songs like "I Zimbra," which foreshadowed the innovations of their next album, "Remain In Light."