DAVID BYRNE & ST. VINCENT

LOVE THIS GIANT (4AD/Remote Control)

There are people young enough to know who St. Vincent is, but who don’t recognise this old guy hanging out with her. There are also people old enough to know David Byrne, but not the work of Annie Clark. I may be Goldilocks right in the middle here, familiar with the music of both, but I’m a bit jealous of those two sets of people getting to hear the work of either musician for the first time, because Love This Giant is an excellent introduction. It ranks among the best things either has done.

Bringing together two idiosyncratic guitarists, you might expect that instrument to dominate. But instead the guitars only appear occasionally, part-timers who work short shifts adding texture to the songs. Overwhelmingly, it’s horns that dominate Love This Giant – a squad of grizzled session musicians who demonstrate every mood a horn section can evoke, from celebratory to sad. They keep to the beat in some, they trill up and down the register in others, but mostly what they do is unite these songs and their singers.

Byrne has always had a gift for singing about the ordinary in a way that elevates it; this is the man who named an album More Songs About Buildings and Food. ‘I Should Watch TV’ is his confession that he feels out of touch and thinks watching TV will connect him. If you’ve ever felt cut off from society because you’re not up to date with Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, you’ll empathise. “This is the place where common people go,” he sings, and he’s right, but the contrast between this utopian idea of popular culture as the great leveller and the reality of its poisonous glamour is also made obvious: “Everybody gets a touched-up hairdo / Everybody’s in the passing lane.”

But for typical subjects being turned on their heads, it’s hard to go past ‘Dinner For Two’, in which an ordinary suburban dinner party carries on while war is fought outside. “What’s her name, I don’t remember / Isn’t that the famous author? / Harry’s gonna get some appetisers / while he’s keeping out of range of small-arms fire.” It’s Love This Giant’s ‘Once In a Lifetime’ moment, the mundane becoming menacing.

That’s a trick Clark can manage as well. In ‘Who’ Byrne asks “Who’ll be my Valentine? / Who’ll share this heavy load?” Don’t worry David, St. Vincent will be your huckleberry. The martial-sounding beat of ‘The Forest Awakes’ accompanies her much more vague and free-associating lyrics, but thematically she’s right alongside him, contrasting regular life with disaster: “The bombs burst in air but my hair is all right.” Then a ramshackle Tom Waits guitar bit comes in and clatters all over the place, making a glorious mess.

There are shared moments where they join together on choruses, but her separated syllables and his drawn-out final vowels often keep to their own corners. They’re brought together by the horns though, a brass bridge between the two of them. Appropriately, the final word on Love This Giant goes to those horns, which soar off into their own Space Odyssey at the climax of ‘Out Of Space and Time’, which is thrilling and perfect.

If you’ve already started putting together your albums of the year list you should burn it and start over, because Love This Giant deserves a place on there.

[rating: 4.5/5]

Jody Macgregor