This past June, the first song we heard from David Byrne and St. Vincent's collaborative project was titled "Who". With its firm acoustic strumming, clear delineation of two vocal parts, and repetition of the word "who?" at the beginning of each line, it recalled one of Byrne's best duets: his collaboration with Tejano pop star Selena on the slinky, slow-burning 1995 song "God's Child". Though not quite as moving (or danceable) as "Child", "Who" was an encouraging sign for the duo's Love This Giant project. St. Vincent's Annie Clark fit well amidst a few of Byrne's favorite tricks: lyrics doubling as a series of philosophical questions, a croony curiosity about the wider world, and an arrangement loaded with the brazen brass blurts (Clark's idea, actually) that Byrne first fell for via his Knee Plays album. A few months later, "Who" opens the duo's full-length album, which falls short of both the single's early promise, and the on-paper perfection of the pairing.
You could argue that David Byrne and Annie Clark collaborating on an album in 2012 is better framed by the question immediately asked of any such high-profile pairing: "Why?" On the surface, the two have quite a few commonalities. Both Byrne and Clark are equally fascinated by the theatricality of everyday life: the scripts and performances that drive our days and raise the stakes of our mundane interactions to the level of high drama or (for this duo) dark comedy. Both performers are known for their thousand-yard stares (compare the covers of Byrne's Feelings with St. Vincent's Actor) that suggest a quiet intensity merged with a playful approach to self-presentation.
More generally, much of the power of Clark's and Byrne's music relies on the tension between being trapped and letting go. The primary narrative arc of Talking Heads' legendary live concert Stop Making Sense sees the reluctantly public shut-in character of the jittery "Psycho Killer" gradually learn to embrace his eccentricities, leading to the effusive gospel of closer "Take Me to the River". In her five-plus years as St. Vincent, Annie Clark has set and broken pre-determined molds from every conceivable direction-- at her best, she can go from "Psycho Killer" to "River" in a single song. It makes sense, then, that much of Love This Giant is taken with the idea of human transformation, as evidenced by the album's prosthetically-enhanced cover art. On "The One Who Broke Your Heart", we hear of "the beautiful people" who "did some work on your face." Clark sings of the hopeful revelations of a gradual thawing process on "Ice Age". On "I Am an Ape", Byrne playfully reverse-engineers evolution.
But at the same time, collaborations aren't always as simple as pairing two smart artists cut from the same cloth. Because they're so taken with the idiosyncrasies of others' behaviors and interactions, Byrne and Clark constantly run the risk of their music tipping over into obsessiveness, of living up to the lifeless caricatures they're ostensibly picking apart. Especially considering the expectations attending a project created by two kindred spirits with ideas and talent to spare, Love This Giant is a disappointment. With precious few exceptions, neither Clark nor Byrne seems willing to push the other into new musical territory that might contain revelations about either. The songs merely stand apart from life and dryly comment on its strangeness, while the arrangements-- most prominently featuring the work of several conservatory-level brass players-- are suffused with the sterility that always threatens long-distance collaborations.
"Dinner for Two" is representative in this regard. The narrator spends the song contemplating the sad fact that he's never able to enjoy a quiet, intimate time with his lover, because both are too busy with such nuisances as dinner parties with possibly famous authors milling about. The song's arid brass arrangement and bland percussion do it no favors (elsewhere on the album, John Congleton handles drum programming duties, and seems intent on dragging the music kicking and screaming into 2001). Later, there's "I Should Watch TV", which whooshes Byrne right past the clever engagement with popular culture that made a song like "Found a Job" such a quirky joy, and plops him straight into a self-important deconstruction of his own silly impulses. He's admitting that he really should watch more TV, because it would offer him insight into the minds of the nameless bodies he sees moving around himself everyday. But he resists, and instead sets off quoting Whitman's "Song of Myself" as if to convince himself of his own uniqueness.
As for St. Vincent, it's hard to imagine too many people discovering her through this collaboration, but either way, she's responsible for Giant's best moments. In her own way, she's downright soulful on the refrains of "Weekend in the Dust", a style that serves as a compelling counterpoint to the icy, aristocratic lilt she inhabits on the verses. Though "Ice Age" may not count among the highlights of Actor or Strange Mercy, it shows Clark's skill at shifting gears mid-song without disturbing the cargo, and at employing elements strategically-- here, *Giant'*s omnipresent (and stiflingly monochromatic) brass is mostly reduced to subtle color and minimalist chorus additions, until blooming during the song's well-earned coda. It's not exactly high praise, I know: Here are the two best songs on a strange flop of a high-profile collaboration. In retrospect, it seems Giant will function less as a career highpoint for either artist, and more as a historical marker of the career trajectories of each participant. Byrne plays the wandering dilettante, content to transform his old ideas anew, while Clark upstages her mentor, convinced she still has a lot more to prove.
