It sounds simple, but shockingly few bands at TV on the Radio's level are able to do it without sounding corny.
Check the segue from the neon sizzle of the Gary Numan/Depeche Mode burner "Careful You" into the open-hearted jangle boogie of "Could You", which achieves the ultra-rare feat of writing a '90s Sugar chorus as good as the ones Bob Mould came up with, or the perfectly-executed Ramones bop that introduces late-album track "Lazerray". What’s quietly happened since then is that TV on the Radio have shed the Best Band in the World expectations and simply become a really good anthemic rock band.
This is a Sitek production, of course, and underneath the lustrous exterior he layers a subtle, high-pitched synth drone (a cousin to the menacing washes of distorted guitar that distinguished the band’s early music), which gives the song a sense of creeping dread nearly at an unconscious level.Īfter Cookie Mountain, as with the followups to so many great records on which a restless band seeks to conquer new territory, Sitek started cleaning up the band’s sound, doing away with its trademark siren-like clamor after falling for the pristine production of "Eyes Without a Face" (listen to that song again and then come back to Light and Seeds. Like their best songs, "Idiot" works because it balances simple catchiness with urgency and anxiety, like their post-punk forebears taught them: the piston-pumping rhythm section is counterposed against Adebimpe’s tenor, which floats in a dazed murmur for the vocals and upshifts to nervous falsetto for the chorus. Like much of Seeds as well as its predecessor, "Idiot" embraces rhythms derived from the electronic end of the dance music spectrum, and does so as easily as they incorporated John Zorn skronk and Prince synth funk in the past. So while TV on the Radio peaked from 2006 to 2008, the last two albums feel less like an artistic decline and more like a shift in focus and a lowering of stakes. The lead single from Seeds, accompanied by a video of Paul Reubens doing a Speed Racer knockoff, was "Happy Idiot", another song superficially about getting over a relationship that can easily double as an strategy for negotiating an existence over which one’s lost all control. Light also marked the point where TV on the Radio more or less stopped incorporating explicit politics in their lyrics-observational and ironic message tracks like "Caffeinated Consciousness" and "No Future Shock" ("do the ‘no future’") felt like an extended ¯\ (ツ)/¯ after the gospel-powered hopefulness of 2008’s "Golden Age", which for more than a few of us was the unofficial theme song of the sadly brief window of hope and change following Obama’s inauguration. The group also broke from its label Interscope, which pushed Mountain in front of the largest possible audience (this is its first album on legendary '70s prog-rock haven Harvest). Most crucially, longtime bassist Gerard Smith passed away from cancer days after Nine Types of Light was released-a huge blow for a tight-knit band. When Adebimpe’s powerhouse vocal comes in, it’s instantly familiar, both as a reminder of the absolute best that the shrunken state of post-millennial rock can produce and the fact that that voice- that voice-can still turn even the most interpersonal utterances into sentiments of galactic force.Įven though it’s meant to signify moving on from a romantic relationship, when Adebimpe keeps rolling out the phrase "but I should really give it up sometime" it’s hard not to remember that the past several years for TV on the Radio-as they came down from the impossible peak of Return to Cookie Mountain-have been marked by different forms of loss. The handclaps, moaning vocals, and what sounds like a South Asian percussion instrument (it’s actually a loop of Sitek dropping a drumstick onto piano strings) sound like a glossier version of "Satellite" and "Staring at the Sun" from 2003’s Young Liars EP, Sitek and Adebimpe still merging lessons drawn from the European-derived NYC avant-garde and centuries of African-American church music. Everything starts in medias res, as if we’ve been dropped into the middle of a séance in the desert. Opening song "Quartz" demonstrates that from a production standpoint, the group hasn’t lost its unique ability to conjure a surreal, soulful dread.