Set Adrift On Memory Bliss

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By John Leland

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I got girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls on my mind," sings David Byrne, normally considered one of pop's headier longhairs, on his coyly titled new album, "Uh-Oh." In this year of scaling down expectations, Byrne has found a way to lower ours of him. "Uh-Oh "completes his transition from doyen of oversophisticated urban alienation to quaint eccentric. No longer a potential psycho killer, he's now the guy who tells poo-poo jokes to the kids.

Along the way, he dispenses small wisdoms to the grown-ups. Not the world's most powerful album, "Uh-Oh" is a fun ride. Byrne slips in and out of personae, telling stories and dropping bits of adult anger amid the childlike play. The album begins with the story of a man undergoing a sex change("The birds and the bees are singing for me," he chirps on "Now I'm Your Mom') and ends with a disarming mambo call-and-response about life and the universe: "Carry us to our beginning / The angels know." In between, there is a scary story, a song of cute, stunted rage and a sporty cowboy fantasy.

"Uh-Oh" is Byrne's fifth solo album outside Talking Heads (the band is now officially quits, though it did reform for a song for Wim Wenders's film "Until the End of the World'). Like all of his solo work, it does a better job of selling its ideas than submerging them in songs. Yet the album's spirit of play is infectious. Through his custom label, Luaka Bop, Byrne has been indulging his taste for Cuban music lately, and "Uh-Oh" plainly declares its Cuban influences. But Byrne's touch is light and glancing: an inverted rhythm here, an unwinding horn break there. The Latin touches don't solidify the music so much as lift it into the ether. This is party music, not ethnomusicology. It comes with a set of miniatures rather than an argument. Byrne has been more intriguing, more relevant, even, but never quite so playful. That's a small thing, but a good one.

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