ANDY: Man, TV on the Radio. Their first album, 2004's Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, had a couple of absolutely captivating tracks, like the vocal feats of strength on "Staring at the Sun". Their sophomore effort and best album to date, 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain, was a more complete record, with the unavoidable single "Wolf Like Me" driving the LP along. 2008's Dear Science was a largely forgettable affair if you ask me, although Raj had some loopy theory about "Golden Age" being a funk song.
So it is with some trepidation that I listened to Nine Types of Light. Will it be a return to form, or a continuation of the last record's blandness? I just hadn't heard anything from these guys in the last five years that even remotely resembled the sonic depth of "I Was A Lover" or "Hours". This album has somewhat conventional beginnings, with Babatunde Adebimpe's incredible pipes wasted on the nearly spoken word track "Second Song". "No Future Shock" has more of the rhythms that Cookie Mountain did so well, but again with oddly uninspiring lyrics and vocal delivery. It's oddly a track that seems like it would be have been a great b-side from The Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz, with Karen O doing her thing all over. "Killer Crane" is a nice slow jam, totally fine, but not that remarkable. "Will Do" is actually pretty sweet, if again, not as lyrically or vocally crazy.
Just when you think I'm really going to dump on this album, "New Cannonball Run" saves the day! This is the TV on the Radio I'm trying to listen to. Big fuzzy synths, fat drums, tight verses, that trademark falsetto, and...horns! The type of ambition and complexity that seemed absent on Dear Science is back once more. "Repetition" is also fun, with little guitar licks where the synths were, and "Forgotten" also has this great interplay between the light cymbals and bells, and the lower synth tones, before it explodes with all the horns and guitars and greatness.
So yeah, 10 tracks, 43 some-odd minutes, and I tend to like the second half of this record more than the first. It's not Return to Cookie Mountain, but thankfully it's also not Dear Science. Glad to hear some of the more complex jams, and I'm looking forward to seeing these guys again this summer. Hopefully it won't be like the last time, with the guys in the Birkenstocks head-banging and ruining "Staring at the Sun" for me. Fuck those guys.
RAJ: Dear Science has less sonically complex production than TV on the Radio's earlier work (although saying that Science's production is bland is typical Andy exaggeration/baiting) - but when it comes to boring trivialities like melodies and hooks, Dear Science blows away the band's other albums by simply trying to actually, like, have them. It's kind of striking how tossed-off the actual songwriting is on the band's two biggest tracks- "Staring at the Sun" is basically a cool bassline and a single verse searching for an actual whole song, and "Wolf Like Me" has an amazingly bland three-note chorus if you actually pay attention to it (which you usually don't, of course - these tracks succeed because of Dave Sitek's production sleight-of-hand). Dear Science, on the other hand, was an album with real songs that you could sing along to and sometimes even dance to (maybe "Golden Age" isn't fucking George Clinton, but you'd be hard-pressed not to call it funky - and "Red Dress" is a goddamned Afrobeat tribute). It was an album that was fun - entertainment with hints of dystopia instead of dystopia with hints of entertainment - which is why it was great (and also why it was spectacularly overrated, but that's another can of worms).
The main point, I guess, is that I don't really have any idea where Andy is coming from, just as I'm totally baffled by his assertion that Nine Types of Light is more in the ambitious and complex vein of Cookie Mountain thanDear Science, when it seems to me like the album sounds way more like the latter instead of the former. This is again stripped-down production in service of straight-ahead songwriting instead of the kind of baroque production showcase that we've seen from these guys in the past. In fact, it's kind of surprising just how conventional a lot of this songwriting is (as I've mentioned before) - this is even closer than Dear Science is to a pop album, with a whole assortment of gooey love ballads along with pretty straight-ahead rawk numbers like "Caffeinated Consciousness". When Tunde sings "Every night we're on a mission/to shift your known position/into the light" on "Second Song", that's a pure dancefloor chorus - in "Dear Science", even the bouncier tracks would start off with things like "Hey jackboot, fuck your war!"
The straightforwardness isn't a bad thing but it certainly keeps this album from being the kind of Statement About Our Times that we're used to from the band - the vibe is much more about great musicians just having fun together. Personally, I don't much care for most of these ballads - great singer that he is, Tunde has always seemed more Thom-Yorke-cerebral than convincing loverboy, and none of these earnest love songs really manage to convince me otherwise. But when the band gets into the high-energy genre-smashing freakouts that they specialize in, the results are predictably great - I agree with Andy that taut, synth-fueled groove "New Cannonball Run" is the best thing on the album (props by the way to any song that name-checks both Cannonball Run and The 400 Blows) and generally the faster the tempo the better the songs are here. So overall, a very solid record, but far from the kind of earthshaking "important" records that have been this band's bread and butter.
TV On The Radio - "Will Do" by Interscope Records
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