Why David Byrne's Dazzling 'Who Is the Sky?' Tour Is Essential: Concert Review (Variety)

[highplainsdem]

https://variety.com/2025/music/reviews/why-david-byrnes-who-is-the-sky-tour-is-essential-concert-review-1236536262/

Oct 1, 2025 9:21am PT
Why David Byrne’s Dazzling ‘Who Is the Sky?’ Tour Is Essential: Concert Review
by Jem Aswad

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Indeed, “Utopia” is an extremely tough act to follow, and obviously at 73 Byrne is no longer the rubber-limbed performer that he was four decades ago. But the “Who Is the Sky?” tour, in support of his 11 th studio album of the same name — which began a four night stand at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday night — finds him delivering a generous number of classics while revisiting and reinventing other corners of his catalog along with most of the new album, all delivered with yet another deeply imaginative stage presentation.

The concept of “Utopia” has continued — the bandmembers are mobile, constantly moving and again dressed all in light blue, but it’s otherwise a totally new production. There are now five dancer-singers, creating a mighty chorus and a more heavily choreographed presentation, and the back and sides of the stage are filled with a giant floor-to-ceiling curved video screen that changes dramatically with each song. For “Naïve Melody (This Must Be the Place)” it’s a bucolic forest; for “Houses in Motion” we’re moving down a nighttime city street with the taillights and streetlights increasingly blurring into impressionist images; for the new “Like Humans Do” it’s a bright white screen with Shel Silverstein-ish cartoon characters popping in and out; for “My Apartment Is My Friend,” we’re transported into his actual New York apartment (which is really nice).

Byrne and the musicians are moving continually through the show in intricate steps that are closer to marching than dancing (the dancers take care of that), with the man himself fading into the troupe when another member solos or is highlighted — and each of the 13 people onstage gets at least one moment in the spotlight. As he told Variety in an interview earlier this year, the mobility has “democratized” the band, and he revels in it without ever forgetting who people are actually there to see.

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So it goes until the middle of the show, when we get several songs from the new album, interspersed with deep cuts (the Talking Heads’ “Slippery People” and “(Nothing but) Flowers,” his cover of Paramore’s “Hard Times”) and then the rousing finale as reward: a mind-melting take on “Psycho Killer” (which he did not play in “American Utopia”) that features the dancers in their most elaborate choreography of the night, followed by a driving “Life During Wartime” that is performed completely under sizzling blue lights until the end, when footage from the recent anti-ICE demonstrations is projected onto the screen as the dancers run around in panic (see what we mean about understatement?). It’s one of several low-key comments on the country’s political environment, the most blatant of which is a giant “MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN” statement in rainbow-colored lettering on the screen, accompanied by a mock Burger King logo that instead reads “No Kings.”

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DUer pecosbob posted about Byrne's YouTube listening party for the new album back on September 5: https://www.democraticunderground.com/1034151014

That YouTube link still works:

[ProfessorGAC]

1. Interesting

Sure sounds like David! His voice isn't what it once was, but that happens to everybody as they age.
I'm interested in the show.
I hope there's a video released.

[highplainsdem]

2. He is going to be in Chicago for four nights, but it looks like most of the tickets still available

are resale tickets going for as much as $1,000+ if they're close to the stage. Hate the scalpers gouging fans. At least one of the venues on the tour had the highest priced tickets at $250 originally.

I hope there'll be a video, too, the professional film it deserves, though I haven't seen an article about that yet.

The venue whose initial prices I just checked says this: "No audio or video recording of any kind is allowed during the performance. No cameras."

Another review, of the show in Buffalo on the 25th:

https://thebuffalohive.com/concert-review-david-byrne-love-is-the-new-punk-rock/

The 13 musicians performed as mobile units, untethered by cords, their instruments strapped to their bodies, wireless headset mics transmitting their startlingly and heartrendingly full, choir-like vocal harmonies. And they danced, from start to finish, as did their bandleader, forming spontaneous circles, weaving between each other in sometimes purposefully stiff, sometimes smooth and languid motions, all the while performing this giddily idiosyncratic and highly challenging music in a flawless manner.

Beneath them, and towering behind and above them in a half-circle, images were projected in startling depth and clarity, changing from song to song, and accentuating the simultaneously abstract and visceral narratives of Byrne’s songs. Then effect transformed the ornate interiors of Shea’s into a smaller scale version of Las Vegas high-tech venue The Sphere.

Hogget’s choreography is remarkable, and stands apart from most contemporary pop dance spectacles, which are almost exclusively hyper-sexualized variations of bump & grind. As interpreted by Byrne and his band, Who is the Sky’s choreography is sensual, sometimes intricate, often casual and organic, and at turns purposefully mechanical in nature. There was something deeply humanistic about the presentation, taken in sum. There was a narrative here, one that suggested an attitude of kindness, cooperation, celebration of differences, and positivity.

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Of course, there were plenty of Talking Heads songs featured, including the first appearance of “Psycho Killer” in nearly 20 years, and an elegiac show-opening take on the gorgeous “Heaven,” which brought me to tears. A thrillingly sinister romp through the deliciously twisted funk of “Houses in Motion” was also a high point.

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[highplainsdem]

3. There are videos from fans on YouTube already. Here's one from last night, the closing song:

[ProfessorGAC]

4. Pretty Cool

Sounded good for a fan video!