Spinoff albums are one of tock's necessary evils. Usually the product of overweening hubris and indulgent pop star wealth i.e., member of a big name band desires to "express" himself and spares no expense to do so–they're rarely much more than massive ego massages.

But all that glitters isn't gall. The best solo LPs by members of working groups reveal: (a) what the artist brings to the band in terms of influences and ideas: (b) what role, creative or otherwise, he or she plays within the group; and (c) what effect the experience of making a solo album may have on the band as a whole. With this in mind, consider the current windfall of solo efforts by the four members of Talking Heads.

Besides the group connection, these discs have two things in common: they're neither "solo" records in the tiresome superstar sense of the word nor are they collectively concerned with the future of post-punk dance music. Essentially the highlights of his score for choreographer Twyla Tharp's The Catherine Wheel, Head-master David Byrne's Songs from the Broadway Production of "The Catherine Wheel" applies the lessons of the four Talking Heads LPs and his avant-garde Afro-rock collaboration with Brian Eno (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) to formalized ballet theater. Husband-and-wife rhythm section Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth assume the disguise of the Tom Tom Club for their busman's-holiday ramble through ethnic urban pop. And on The Red and the Black, guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison takes members of last year's expanded touring Heads even deeper into the heart of funky darkness initially explored on the Heads' Remain in Light.

In a way, Songs from the Broadway Production of "The Catherine Wheel," Tom Tom Club and The Red and the Black are all Talking Heads albums. What makes them so isn't their rhythms or their generally overriding seriousness. Instead, it's a unique combination of both: a volatile schizo-fusion of academic cool and barely suppressed dance fever, epitomized by the band's 1978 cover version of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" and the holocaust-party anthem "Life during Wartime" on 1979's Fear of Music.

Unlike most soundtracks and original-east releases, David Byrne's score for The Catherine Wheel (which premièred last September) has a life of its own. The wonder of Twyla Tharp's choreography for the seventy-three-minute show is that she brings to the studied grace of modern dance the sexual intensity and liberating spontaneity of punk's electric stomp. Byrne's music and lyrics do the same thing in reverse, creating a dazzling mixture of rock & roll overdrive, R&B elasticity and ambient gimmickry but with a sense of gripping dramatic purpose. You don't have to see Tharp's dancers to know that this music moves for them.

Five songs here boast familiar Byrne-Heads trademarks – clipped melodic phrasing, a martial beat, the singer's strangled wail – but with a number of fresh and appealing twists. "My Big Hands (Fall through the Cracks)," a stunning expression of brute ignorance and greed, crawls like a fat king snake, with drummer Yogi Horton's slow-motion strut punctuated by Byrne's low, bubbling synthesizer. Immediately, "Big Business" bursts in, a frantic adaptation of African high-life music marked by a ringing chorus of church-bell guitar harmonies.

The instrumentals are especially revelatory, as David Byrne dissects the Talking Heads sound and adds, subtracts and rearranges the parts to arrive at some extraordinary combinations. Only four of the work's eighteen instrumentals appear on the record (all are included on the cassette version, itself a four-star investment). Of these. "Two Soldiers" features solid multiple-bass rhythms while Byrne's synthesizers and Adrian Belew's tensile guitars argue among themselves. "The Red House" stars Eno's electronically altered Moslem prayer call, and "Cloud Chamber" is Edgard Varese-type music for kitschy percussion.

Compared to the weighty import of David Byrne's modern-dance inventions, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth's Tom Tom Club is light but learned entertainment, at once a hip cartoon parody of and a sincere compliment to the Third World beat they play with Talking Heads. In this season's rock-disco smash, "Genius of Love," the Weymouth Sisters Chorale (Tina. Laura and Lam) read the black-music honor roll–Bob Marley, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, Smokey Robinson, et al. – like some puckish cross between Pink Lady and the Vienna Boys Choir over a sunny Carib-funk rhythm track.

Still, it's no easy task disentangling the playful mesh of funk bump, reggae stride, punk movie and lilting "lover's rock" whipped up by the Tom Tom Club, a baker's dozen that includes Frantz, the Weymouth women, Wailer Tyrone Downie and auxiliary Heads Adrian Belew and Bernie Worrell from the Remain in Light tour. The fact that you can hear the inspirations through the gags–the kindergarten word jive of "Wordy Rappinghood" and coproducer Steven Stanley's moccasin game-style dub mixing–is a testimony to the group's sincerity and skill.

Jerry Harrison's The Red and the Black is the dark horse of the bunch. Chastised at first as a cheap imitation of Remain in Light, it's actually a radical extension of that album's art-funk precepts. True, Harrison's LP sounds a lot like Remain in Light (which is understandable, since Belew, Worrell and other members of the Heads funk family play on it), but there are major differences. On Remain in Light, such tracks as "Born under Punches" and "The Great Curve" were straight 4 4 grooves, driven by the rhythmic contradictions of the arrangements. On The Red and the Black, Harrison sets groove against groove, creating intense polyrhythmic arguments ("Things Fall Apart," the herky-jerky "Magic Hymie") that are further heated by his own combative lyrics and pyscho-hipster sing-speak. In Talking Heads, Harrison (a former Modern Lover) specializes in counterpoint, emphasizing the idiosyncratic flow of David Byrne's tunes with jarring guitar and keyboard figures.

He does the same thing to his own songs on The Red and the Black. Springy guitar and keyboard parts lock gears with competing drum patterns that range from sexy boogaloo ("Slink") to a regimental ten-beat loop ("No Warning. No Alarm"). First, there's ricochet percussion and an eerie wail of singers who evoke a spooky jungle backdrop. Then Adrian Belew's guitar explodes into shards of Jimi Hendrix-like metal. Reveling in this confusion, Jerry Harrison never loses control.

And control is what's at stake here. David Byrne is usually credited with running the Heads shop, yet a sense of unflinching adventure courses through each of these records–bravely experimental in Byrne's and Harrison's, sprightly and mischievous in the Tom Tom Club's. They all pull in strikingly different directions, and, let's face it, bands have split up for less reason than that. But in making their solo albums, the members of Talking Heads probably realize that they've broken ground they may never have reached together. The next time they go into the studio as a group, they should be that much stronger for it. (RS 363)

DAVID FRICKE