David Byrne: American Utopia review – anxiety dreams from centrist dad

The would-be Roland Barthes of the five boroughs continues his puckish, lifelong interrogation of contemporary culture. As ever, his focus is the banal stuff of everyday yuppiedom – money, cars, tourism, shopping – and there is a Once in a Lifetime-style anxiety running through it all. But like some evangelistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he also finds potential and even a kind of poetry in it. The album title, he has said, is not ironic: Byrne seems to hope, like the ultimate “centrist dad”, that we can shift our capitalist culture into a more progressive mode.

More ideas, then, than most artists attempt, but the delivery is uneven. Every Day Is a Miracle has a lovely, swelling chorus melody, but its lyrics are toxically whimsical, full of heavenly chickens and newspaper-ignoring elephants. Byrne’s menagerie expands on Dog’s Mind, a secular hymn which compares the pampered middle classes to their canine pets: “Now a dog cannot imagine / What it is to drive a car / And we, in turn, are limited / By what it is we are.” The album is full of pronouncements like this, that aim at being zen kōans for a smartphone age, but fall intellectually short.

There are more prosaic issues too. The theatrical Byrne delivers many of the songs like show tunes, which, even if you find the aesthetic grating, can be read as a bit of knowing razzle-dazzle. But he is unforgivably fond of the top end of his register, and can be heard microtonally straining towards some big notes, like someone who has picked a Whitney or Adele song at karaoke but is determined to style it out. Everybody’s Coming to My House and Every Day Is a Miracle are badly damaged as a result.

The backings, made with an infamously all-male group of 25 collaborators, are a mixed bag – Daniel Lopatin’s alt-R&B production on This Is That is beautifully spacious and sad, but Brian Eno’s over-thought drum programming is tinny and funkless, and includes the politest drum’n’bass breakdown ever, on Doing the Right Thing. Byrne is too instinctive a songwriter to ever totally miss the mark, and his melodic gifts certainly haven’t left him – but this album often tends towards a ghastly dystopia of kitsch.