[Fear of Music] is the inevitable consequence of toying with psychosis. It's a work that is built, and also feeds, upon the paranoia of Fritz Lang's cinema, the violence of The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the terrorization of Mission: Impossible. This album lacks, and constantly avoids, the patriotism, sense of community and bubble gum-disco-psychedelic playfulness that make Talking Heads' first two albums such warm, albeit odd, friends. Like Randy Newman, Byrne has mastered the ironic backhand (i.e., "The Big Country", "Don't Worry About the Government"), but on Fear, songs like "Animals" and "Electric Guitar" are ironically banal….

The beauty of More Songs About Buildings and Food is that one can never figure out what the songs are exactly about (about aboutness, perhaps). The disappointment of Fear of Music is that one can immediately decode its aboutness: inertia, the noblink of the no wave, Eno Brain, artsy...