David Byrne
The Forest

From the moment this CD (already ghostly and twilight on the cover) slides into the CD player, one steps into a road of no return. It’s like stepping into the first of a series of infernal circles reminiscent of Dante. A cross between a nightmare and a highly suggestive and irresistible poetic hallucination. You lose footing. Everything falls apart. The weak boundaries of genre are dismantled and reassembled. Rock music, classical music, polyphonic choirs, Gregorian chants, everything is mixed in the magic cauldron of Wizard Byrne, a true alchemist and in this case, a true conductor sui generis.

This phase (for many a minor one) belongs to the most submerged and dark production of this ex-comedian named David Byrne, former leader of the infamous 80s Talking Heads. "The Forest" is a digression into another territory, dark and daring, a sort of no man's land, made of shadows and specters, which are the same specters that have always tormented the multifaceted and misaligned personality of Byrne, a cross between the sick psyche of Anthony Perkins and the gothic-creative madness of Tim Burton.
The Forest is a small jewel that was once dismissed by sales and killed by a criticism tied to academic schemes, caught off guard by a work hard to label in a well-defined genre.
It is a work (realized in theater with Robert Wilson) dedicated to the most ancient myth of man, that of Gilgamesh and the epic of the Sumerian people (an old love of our own Battiato who dedicated another work, "Gilgamesh" indeed, to the same myth). The tracks are mostly orchestral, full of dark sounds that unleash, as the minutes pass, atavistic and profound impulses, with mighty epic openings and hypnotic songs that retrace, at times, the same path as timeless works like Ravel's Bolero. Everywhere the fusion between avant-garde pop of the Talking Heads Byrne and a more cultured and noble music of a different Byrne, darker and bleaker, mostly unknown to us, is evident. Emerging from these tracks is the decadent charm of a curious, brilliant, and unexpected musician-author and returns to us a discoverer of new sounds belonging to other territories far from the world of auteur pop-rock we know.

Epic and monumental album, to be taken in small doses: not recommended at all for chronic depressives or the most extreme Gothic-Fantasy enthusiasts. In both cases here one could truly do oneself harm.