By Jeff Miers

Well, there’s a little bit of time left, but at this point, it sure looks like the “album of the year” kudos for 2008 will be going to David Byrne and Brian Eno, for their magnificent “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” album — at least from where I’m sitting. It’s not that Byrne and Eno needed to rejuvenate their careers or had somehow been simply spinning on the treadmill aimlessly over the last, say, 20 years. Both, in fact, have done some of the best work of their lengthy careers in this current decade. But “Everything” is absolutely brimming with creative life, deep soul, abundant creativity and the forward-looking ethic that has been a benchmark of both men’s work, be it Eno’s with Roxy Music, U2 and on his own, or Byrne’s with Talking Heads and during a solo career that now eclipses his work with that band. Call it “Love in the Time of Ennui,” for there is something prayerlike and quietly hopeful in this music, even if it is filtered through a creative sensibility that finds doe-eyed optimism as offensive as nostalgia. It’s unusual music to be hearing in a rather plastic age, and it is all the more powerful for that fact. Byrne and his band are on tour performing “Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno,” and early reports indicate that this evening’s 8 p. m. show inside the University at Buffalo Center for the Arts is likely to be a transcendent one. Byrne will perform much of “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today,” and he won’t be stingy with the material he and Talking Heads originally recorded with Eno back in the day. We might even hear a bit of “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” the 1981 album that was the first to be credited solely to the Eno/Byrne duo. Tonight’s show is sold out.