SPEAKING IN TONGUES

With their fifth album, our Babbling Heads are on top of their game (bettering their previous RiL album) with the marvellous pop/rock masterpiece Speaking In Tongues, where they manage the rare feat to write an album-full of clever pop tunes that would climb the charts on a few occasions, yet still be sufficiently adventurous to interest the more discerning music fans. Still with the original quartet (even if the previous album had been extended as far as a nine-piece, many of whom return here), SiT was released more than two years after RiL, but the present retains much of its former direction, still under African influences, but now enlarging it to the Caribbeans.

Most likely if you were anywhere close to a radio around that early 80's period, youi'll find that a good deal of this album quite familiar, because six of the album's nine tracks got regular airplay on the Hertzian channels. Opening on the chart-busting Burning Down The House (with its companion videoclip, a hit on MTV) epitomizes the album's excellent pop formula with plenty of minor innovations and small finds, such as Frantz's brilliant drumming and the descending drum rolls during the instrumental breaks. Flippy Floppy would be a stand out track on any other SH album, but here it pales a bit, especially that the whole first side of the album is filled with very catchy tunes like dancey Girlfiend, the jumpy Slippery People (with those superb enhanced chorus vocals), and the lower-profile Wild Gravity.

The flipside is a tad less familiar, even if it opens with the disturbing (and slightly slimy) Swamp and those chilling chorus, reminiscent of a sinister Reich (enhanced on stage with a martial military march). Brilliant stuff. Moon Rocks is less immediate as the fake Caribbean steel drums are too repetitive and irritate (a bit) by the fourth of the five minutes. Pull up The roots has awful synth sounds of the early and mid-80's, Frantz probably being absent that day to prevent these from happening. The album closing Place (Naïve Melody) is a much smoother tune, which returns a bit to Caribbean1 rhythms.

SiT was the only vinyl I ever owned from the TH, so I had to borrow all f the previous album to review them and fell onto the remastered double versions with a 5.1 DVD plus clips, but I haven't found this one getting the same treatment, which would be a shame if it didn't. An outstanding pop album whose content which would fill much of the SH's future film project, the absolutely wonderful Stop Making Sense movie by Jonathan Demme and become the group's career-defining icon. Sadly though, this album and that movie would have the TH reaching their apex, but finding it impossible to main on top, and the group would slowly lose its momentum and suffer from internal frictions, as well as the Frantz/Weymouth hubby and wife team's increased involvement in the Tom Tom Club side project. Be warned though, that no matter how brilliant a pop album this might be, it's nothing "prog", despite its presence on our ProgArchives.

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