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- Record Label: Rhino / Warner Records
- Release Date: Jul 25, 2025
![More Songs About Buildings And Food [Super Deluxe Edition] Image](https://static.metacritic.com/images/products/music/6/648e4e4e4940d6bdf0cdd521acf716d5-98.jpg)
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- Record Label: Rhino / Warner Records
- Genre(s): Pop/Rock
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Positive: 5 out of 5
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Jul 29, 2025There’s nothing earthshaking among the bonus cuts (10 alternate takes plus an instrumental version of Fear of Music’s “Electricty”). But they do shine light on process. .... That version of Talking Heads, the house party dance band, gets showcased here in a cleaned up copy of a widely-circulated concert bootleg, recorded in the summer of 1978 in New York at the short-lived Entermedia Theater.
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Aug 7, 2025On early takes of I'm Not In Love (slathered in squelch) and Found A Job (crowded with delay effects) you hear how judicious restraint and the fastidious dispositions of all involved would make the final songs, like the words Byrne brings to them, seem somehow both precise and spontaneous at the same time. [Sep 2025, p.95]
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Jul 29, 2025Both the Entermedia set and the alternate takes underscore how much the studio shaped and sculpted these songs. Like the etiolated, unstrung Polaroid band portraits on the album sleeve, there’s a lack of connective tissue in these versions, the alternate Found A Job lacking the delirious carnival sheen of the album take, the live Artists Only missing the full cinema-matinee drama of Jerry Harrison’s moustache-twirling keyboards. [Sep 2025, p.88]
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Jul 29, 2025Some early Talking Heads fans would say something was lost when the band lost their preppy soul edge and went down the Byrne and Eno art-school alleyway with their next pair of albums. Others might say More Songs About Buildings And Food suffers from being a halfway house between the band’s early sound and what it would become under Eno and Byrne’s constrictive guiding hand. But even as a transitional record More Songs About Buildings And Food is extraordinary. [Aug 2025, p.83]
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UncutJul 29, 2025They keep everything buoyant, even when the songs aren't so strong. .... A more psychedelic take on "Found A Job" is the pick of the alternative versions, while an August 1978 live set from new ork's Emtermedia Theater is reliably invigorating, if not quite as vital as the CBGB stand unearthed for the Talking Heads: 77 box. [Sep 2025, p.50]