Last night’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival opened with the groovy and unrelenting music of New Wave icon David Byrne. Byrne played a nearly-2 hour set of his material borne out of collaborations with Brian Eno, drawing from three Talking Heads albums and the albums My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and last year’s Everything that Happens will Happen Today. Byrne was on-form and his band drove the set with powerful, in-the-pocket grooves that brought the audience back to those halcyon days when the Talking Heads were a critically-acclaimed and popular band (even if some of the audience members, this one included, did not live those days). Fans dug versions of “Once in a Lifetime†and “Life During Wartimeâ€, which were true to the original and featured, like many of the other songs, whacky antics from Byrne and his supporting cast, a mix of musicians and dances all clad in white.
This stop in Brooklyn was part of a larger “Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno†tour that has been going on since the fall of 2008 and will continue across the US and overseas to Europe for the summer. Celebrate Brooklyn is in it’s thirtieth year and is more popular than ever – this concert featured the largest crowd in the festival’s history. Celebrate Brooklyn is rocking an awesome line up – artists diverse as John Scofield, Big Daddy Kane, Femi Kuti, Dr. Dog, MGMT and Animal Collective (the last two are benefit concerts and, therefore, not free) will grace the Prospect Park Bandshell – and ya’ll should definitely get down there to enjoy the festivities. The only piece of advice that I can share is that it is essential to get there early. Once the crowd reaches overcapacity, the gates are shut and people left out have to watch from afar, which is still neat, but not quite the same.
Huh, I don’t really know how to start this one. So everybody here knows who Coldplay is, right? Fairly big alt-pop band with arena-sized choruses, love, Fair Trade, falsettos…got Brian Eno to come in and produce their latest? Cool. So I can get right into it and say that Viva La Vida is the most accomplished album of their career. I mean that in pretty much every way: every song has its own color, the runtime is perfect, and the band has never sounded tighter or more inspired. It’s also the closest they’ve come to making a complete statement, rather than just stringing a bunch of romantic, isolated and vaguely political songs together and calling it an album. What is that statement you ask? Well, look at the title. Martin christened the first song of the band’s debut with the chorus “We live in a beautiful world.” Viva La Vida is his way of opening up that world and exposing its beauty. Yeah there’s death, yeah there’s heartache, yeah there’re…despots and lynch mobs…but all of this pales in comparison to the vibrancy of life itself. Is that a bunch of flowery bullshit? Well, that’s for you to decide. I’m willing to suspend disbelief for forty-five minutes.