David Byrne and Brian Eno

The first time the multitalented pair of David Byrne and Brian Eno cut an album together, I was a month old. 1981’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts might have a title that sounds vaguely like a dyslexic soothsayer speaking about Iraq and the American president, but the madly experimental album was enormously prescient for the world of music, its creators unconventionally picking ad hoc instruments and, in their attempt to distill the world into their music, ending up with a roughly-crafted ancestor to what we call sampling.

Their new album is decidedly lacking in musical revolution. It is an album made out of what Byrne describes as “proper songs,” and yet there is cause for celebration. Eno and Byrne have come a long way from their Talking Heads days, and are now clearly content churning out music that seems initially very familiar.

After hearing the intoxicating ”˜Home’ and ”˜My Big Nurse’, a track that sounds like a raw Cohen wannabe, it’s ridiculously easy to label songs from this album as similar to recent-Radiohead or The Flaming Lips or even Panic At The Disco.

And then one song blows your mind. ”˜I Feel My Stuff’ is a remarkable, epic track. The soundscape is vivid and varied, lush and lull-inducing, and Byrne’s vocals are given the full Eno treatment here — the way he sings “look away, look away” evokes visuals of bouncing ping-pong balls. The lyrics mesmerise, rhymes defying all rules, just like the song itself. Marvellously unpredictable.

Almost all the tracks start off simply but only to change midstream, musical quirks popping in yet, eventually, grounding the piece largely within its skin. Most of these are simple, mellow songs disguised within a highly layered and sporadically ambient soundscape. Some are cloyingly basic ”“ ”˜Life Is Long’ starts almost like MLTR; ”˜The River’ serves only as an easy-listening segue before altering the mood — but each track is beautifully designed, and there are enough stunners to keep you hooked. One is ”˜Strange Overtones’, a hyper-Eighties sounding track with bongos, tambourines and synthesisers all coming together. “This groove is out of fashion / These beats are 20 years old,” Byrne confesses, as Eno turns the track into a haunting one. And then there’s the superbly complex arrangement surrounding the smartly written ”˜Poor Boy’, which manages to, between verses, even toss in a faint Bappida touch through some horn-synth asides.

The album ends with ”˜The Lighthouse,’ a meticulously crafted ambient arrangement, a fantastic closer that leaves you both comforted and awed.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is a constant surprise, a deeply pleasurable album that savours the simple joys of life while perpetually tossing us a googly and giving us something fresh to marvel at. Older and wiser, Eno and Byrne aren’t trying to change the world anymore, but they are making it a better, more interesting sounding place. Their cool is now a laidback one, one that doesn’t need to posture or talk about its own awesomeness. Maybe we should just call them the Thinking Heads.