On the cover of [Talking Heads'] new album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, a life-sized group portrait is created from hundreds of extreme close-up Polaroids; the composite is sectioned into squares, the way a photorealist would reproduce a photograph on canvas. The resulting photomosaic, though composed of clear photographic images, is more like a painting—distorted, fascinating, and unreal.

Talking Heads' songs are similarly dissociated, blindly passionate while rigidly logical, naively logical though twisted by passion. Perceptions and sensations are experienced systematically, almost as if they're on a graph….

The Talking Heads program for living in a mechanical world is to assimilate systemization with the rigor of religion. Byrne is forever asserting his faith in himself, making decisions, reasoning, and getting organized; but he is just as often losing control, threatening, angry, distracted by sensation, vision, buildings, or food. Delusions and paranoid structures create a network of...