Catherine Wheel

David Byrne | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sire / London/Rhino
• ASIN: B000002KNC
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #114,352 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A funky masterpiece that floats., July 8, 1998

By 

Jerome Kelly "Conventional Ear" (Fullerton, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Catherine Wheel (Audio CD)

"The Catherine Wheel" will always be one of my favorite albums. Back in the mid 80's, when my college friend and I needed to decide on some good stereo music late at night, we'd look at each other, say "It!", and play "The Catherine Wheel." This collection of Talking-Heads-ish pieces will characterize your internal and external environment in the period during which you familiarize yourself with it. Hearing it years later will evoke many of the feelings and mental images that you experienced while listening to it. Usually, it takes at least whole year's worth of pop radio to achive this effect in me, but David Byrne did it in one CD. I've secretly been wishing that David Byrne would one day return temporarily to this style of his music: layered acoustic percussion and rhythm elements, freaky electric, not necessarily electronic, sounds and samples, and sparse melodies held together by Byrne's yelling-singing voice.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ONE OF THE BEST EVER, but where is the COMPLETE score on CD?, November 27, 2004

By 

G. Mitchell "greggmitch" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Catherine Wheel (Audio CD)

I bought this cassette back in junior high school when I was truly obsessed with TALKING HEADS - they had just made the brave leap forward with the ENO-helmed REMAIN IN LIGHT, which remains in my TOP 10 of all time albums - but THIS original score for Twyla Tharp's dance production is in many ways even more mind-blowing, ground-breaking, and seminal - here Byrne is given free reign to do his thang and explore the very limits of music, percussion, vocals, and song structure, or lack thereof...truly truly SPELL-BINDING stuff! But here's the rub: my original long OOP cassette version that WB released (BLUE cover, not RED) contains the COMPLETE score, with many tracks/sections NOT found on the sadly abbreviated CD - I guess they couldn't fit all of its BRILLIANCE on one CD, so they chose to edit - now that it's legendary, why not re-issue an expanded, double-CD with the entire score for posterity?! And why not include some of the 12" MIXES of BIG BUSINESS, etc released on 12" only singles at the time?! Trust me, once you buy this and start listening, you will come back to it over & over again - this is over two decades and I still come back to it every few months - WAY AHEAD OF ITS TIME, NEVER GROWS OLD! Sadly, Byrne would never top this...I find all of this later TALKING HEADS (post-Speaking In Tongues) and solo projects dry, brittle, flat, and dull - that tired "world music" white man's burden trap. Oh well. At least we have THIS to cherish.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Catherine Wheel: The Complete Broadway Byrne, October 20, 2000

By 

MIA (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Catherine Wheel (Audio CD)

The Catherine Wheel is simply a masterpiece of modern electronic music. Here we find David Byrne, unfettered by the limitations of the pop song format that constrained his work with Talking Heads, stretching his wings as a modern composer. The Catherine Wheel combines the best lessons of Byrne's synth-funk and found-vocal Eno collaborations ("The Red House") with quirky and soaring sound scapes ("Light Bath," "Dinosaur"), verbal ellipses and his trademark (and under appreciated!) rhythmic-lead guitar work. There is no wasted music on this one: every track has something wonderful to offer. Because The Catherine Wheel was written as a dance score, a number of tracks lack the formal structures of pop songs. But these are not gratuitous noodlings nor mere sketches of songs that might have been. Rather, each piece has an integrity and musical interest to it. And, on a larger scale, the layers of rhythm and instrumental texture throughout draw the ear and the mind into a complete and coherent musical vision. The Catherine Wheel reveals one of America's great musical minds in full flower.