"More Songs About Buildings and Food"

While all that's going on, the music sounds as though it's being sucked into a jet engine. It's one of many Brian Eno moments. The intrepid producer and electronic-music pioneer, in his first collaboration with the Heads, blows an otherworldly breeze, playing with time and space, everything zooming backwards and forwards, coming together and flying apart. The partnership between Byrne and Eno which began here would continue through the Heads album "Remain in Light" as well as the Byrne-Eno side project "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," the music sinking deeper and deeper into pure, pseudo-tribal rhythm.

Some blamed Byrne's closeness to Eno on the increasing tensions between band members, but if the group dynamic was love-hate, so was the music. This was the band Eno was born to produce. Accidents don't get any happier. Everything was in question, nothing stable.

So the song "Girls Want to Be With the Girls" calls up images of high school dances, girls on one side, boys on the other, with hints of future gender tension. The song's title can be read innocently or not, but either way, these are no pillow-fighting nymphos. "Girls are getting into abstract analysis/ They want to make intuitive leap." It's another marching song, Weymouth's bass moonwalking through keyboards that rain like magic bells, driving straight into Byrne's fiercest testimony to work, "Found a Job."

Eno, who admired the Velvet Underground's use of every instrument in a rhythmic assault, must have loved this song. With relentless guitars, it mimics the hypnotic effect of good work, the way intense focus nails one so thoroughly to a job that everything else is forgotten.

It presents work as love therapy, two people saved not by religion or Valentine's Day cards, but shared task. Bored by television and each other, they start making up their own shows. "Judy's in the bedroom, inventing situations/ Bob is on the street today, scouting up locations/ They've enlisted all their family/ They've enlisted all their friends/ It helped saved their relationship, and made it work again." It's running music, churning, arms and legs flying, the constant rhythm spiraling like a drill press.

Once again, love as energy, propelling, launching. Music for a nation of fill-in-the-blank-aholics, for whom work addiction might be the only hope. If you can't exorcise your dark side, employ it.

"I'm Not in Love" takes the notion even further, positing a life minus romance. Could we mine the energy of love without wasting valuable resources on heartbreak and occasional felonious assault? Maybe it's not such an unreasonable desire, at least when love stops working. For a workaholic like Byrne, the inspirational spark of love is most important, not make-out sessions on the couch. "I'm Not in Love" takes the spark and leaves the love behind.

That loveless daydream fades breathlessly into "Stay Hungry," an aerobic workout song for lovers in a world that can't get there without love. "I think that we can signify our love now/ Ooh girl, you can initiate an impulse of love." Ignition, with instructions on how to keep the engine going. "Make a motion, make a motion, make a motion/ Pull it tighter, pull it tighter, pull it tighter/ Double beatin', double beatin', double beatin'/ Palpitation, palpitation, palpitation/ Stay hungry, Stay hungry, Stay hungry."

Now the centerpiece, Byrne's bizarre recasting of Al Green's "Take Me to the River," in which sex and love are baptism, lust and self-annihilation all at once. Try to really hear the song again; it's been stripped of threat by overplay but deep down there still bubbles a weird amalgamation. Find a tape of the "Saturday Night Live" performance and watch Byrne on guitar, the way the notes fall apart in his hands as he chops the chords into a love song swimming for life against a tide of fear and hunger. The song is chemical, molecules fusing, turning into something as new and dangerous as a love affair.

Finally, in "The Big Country," we board a plane and sail over everything, the whole country. "Places to park by the factories and buildings/ Restaurants and bars for later in the evening/ Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas." But something is missing. The narrator longs for something real. "I'm tired of looking out the windows of the airplane/ I'm tired of traveling. I want to be somewhere/ It's not even worth talking about those people down there." Finally it all devolves into a memorable chorus of nonsense. "Goo Goo Ga Ga Ga/ Goo Goo Ga Ga Ga."

Twenty-five years later, who doesn't board planes with mixed emotions, longing to simply be somewhere as the world comes apart, love stretched by anxieties real and imagined? The greatness of "More Songs About Buildings and Food" lies in the way it followed the almost invisible undercurrents of its time to their natural and unnatural conclusions. The self-help theme that runs through the record, the tips and strategies, sound no stranger today than any of a hundred modern remedies.

In 1978, the Heads were still a few years shy of some of their biggest hits, and hadn't yet wandered onto the African and Brazilian paths that would drive the groove deeper and sometimes brighter. Nor had they released the solo efforts that would hint at the future careers of the always eclectic Byrne, the brooding Harrison, the sunnier Frantz and Weymouth. No, the clouds were still gathering on "More Songs." You knew the lightning was coming. Blue skies would have to wait.

They were still en route over troubled lands. There was no easy way around the questions, no safe place to land. That's why the hope of this music lies in its very darkness: Sometimes learning there is no cure is the best therapy. If you can't exorcise the darkness, work it, and keep that love ignition going, going, going.

• View blog reactions