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Listening to “Here Lies Love” means first coming to terms with the bizarre reality of this album: David Byrne, Fatboy Slim, and a host of guest singers narrating the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, First Lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. It’s an alt-rock opera about a woman most well known for the appalling excess of her collection of 3,000 designer shoes. As if that weren’t bewildering enough, it fails to cover the most well-known events of its subject’s life...
Luckily, the music—even closer to pure pop than Byrne’s Talking Heads work—is fantastic. Fatboy Slim brings a processed, electronic-tinged danceability to a collection that evokes the disco funk of New York’s Studio 54, where Marcos was famous for dancing with celebrities like Andy Warhol. Warhol is actually name-dropped on “Dancing Together,” which features a mix of crashing drums and a funky bass line that make it the album’s closest approximation to both disco...
Disco isn’t much of a stretch for Fatboy Slim’s dance music production style, but together Slim and Byrne explore an impressive range of genres. “A Perfect Hand” presents a guitar and piano simplicity that would be at home on a Bruce Springsteen album, with lyrics to match. Steve Earle, the only male vocalist on the album besides Byrne himself, growls, “There are many ways to win a game / And skill is not enough,” inviting the listener to imagine the pressure put on Marcos...
Byrne and Slim quickly establish musical and thematic focus in this opener: its blend of processed dance rhythms and orchestral accents serve as a fair synopsis of the album’s sound, and the inspiration for the album’s title—Marcos’s asking that “Here Lies Love” be inscribed on her tombstone—is immediately explained...
...Crimson finished in third place at the Yale Spring Opener at Yale’s world-famous golf course on Saturday, ending the day a slim 10 strokes behind the Bulldogs and nine strokes behind Central Connecticut...