Continuing the orientation of Jones' previous release Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing is a pop album that forays into new wave and dance, while in terms of rhythm it is, ostensibly, a reggae record. John Daniel Bull of The Line of Best Fit felt the album "[pinpointed] the peak of [Jones'] Jamaican influences, by way of reggae rhythms blended with R&B beats." However, Treble writes: "in terms of atmosphere and melody, there's nothing roots or rude-boy about it. The magazine also considered Nightclubbing to be an important exponent of sophisti-pop, placing it "somewhere between art-pop and dub"; it also described its sonority as "a lush landscape of surrealistsynth-pop. The Style Con's Erich Kessel felt the album was an influential exponent of art-pop. Nightclubbing also incorporates elements of electro, and New York club music.
Though the trio first hit the mass U.S. consciousness with 1989's electronic dance-pop The Raw and the Cooked, their 1985 debut was a soul-jazz pop charmer that's more low key but every bit as entertaining. Along the lines of early Everything But the Girl (the two groups share a producer, Robin Millar) with a heavier Motown influence, the songs on Fine Young Cannibals are uniformly strong. The singles "Johnny Come Home" (a plea to a runaway that sounds like the Beat's ska stripped down to its tense and obsessive essentials) and "Blue" (one of the more oblique and successful anti-Margaret Thatcher tracks of its era) are terrific, but album tracks like the casually devastating "Funny How Love Is" and the manic "Like a Stranger" (which incongruously ends with a female chorus shrieking "You've been too long in an institution!" repeatedly while Gift tries out his Otis Redding impression) are even better. The album's highlight, though, is a reworking of "Suspicious Minds" (with scarifying backing vocals by Jimmy Somerville) that, while it doesn't replace Elvis' version, certainly takes the song into an interesting new direction. Although often overlooked, especially in the U.S., in the wake of their massively successful follow-up, Fine Young Cannibals is a powerful and satisfying debut.
Remain in Light is the fourth studio album by American rock band Talking Heads, released on October 8, 1980 by Sire Records. It was recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas and Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia between July and August 1980 and produced by longtime collaborator Brian Eno. Following the release of their previous album Fear of Music in 1979, the quartet and Eno sought to dispel notions of the band as a mere vehicle for frontman and lyricist David Byrne. Drawing on the influence of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, the band experimented with African polyrhythms, funk, and electronics, recording instrumental tracks as a series of looping grooves.
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