REI MOMO

It is really a surprise for me to find that David Byrne and The Talking Heads were included in the Prog Archives database. I mean: was The Talking Heads a Progressive Rock band? I don`t think so. I think the same about this album, which is the only one solo album which I have listened from David Byrne, and it was a long time ago. In 1997, a friend lent me three albums in the cassette format: one from Rubén Blades (who is from Panama, if I remember well, and he is very good musician and particularly a very good lyricist in the Spanish language who plays Afro-Antillean music too), one from Molotov (an Alternative Rock Mexican band with funny lyrics with social commentaries), and this album from David Byrne. I liked all these three albums. Some years before that, I listened in the radio to one of the songs which was included in this "Rei Momo" album, titled "Loco de Amor". This album was recorded with Afro-Antillean musicians playing Afro-Antillean music (also called as Salsa Music in some countries) with lyrics written in the English language and sometimes also using a few Spanish words in the lyrics. The arrangements are played in this style of music, which is not one of my favourties, but I recognize that there are some very good musicians playing this kind of music (Juan Luis Guerra from Dominican Republic is also a very good musician and lyricist in this style of music). The mix of Afro-Antillean Music with English language lyrics in this "Rei Momo" album sounds a bit strange at the first listenings but at the same time funny in parts, but amazingly it works very well. Some of the lyrics are social commentaries, and I think that the best lyrics are for the song titled "Women Vs. Men", which seem directed to the extreme feminist followers in a very funny way.I don`t know if Byrne released another album like this, but it works very well even if it was only a one-off musical experiment.