“Golden Age”
from the album Dear Science
2008
iTunes
One of the most striking things about TV on the Radio’s 2006 opus Return to Cookie Mountain was one of its very first sounds: a mysterious sample that could have been a warped orchestral blast, the mellifluous din of a building collapse, or the mating call of a brontosaurus. That sound set the tone for a hurricane of an album whose mystery was made to unravel over the span of a hundred listens. Its subtlety came, almost incongruously, from an overabundance of great ideas, rather than the refinement of one in particular. On Dear Science, TVOTR finds a more traditional consistency, transmuting that dirty experimentalism into a lush cleanliness that eases — rather than hurls — its songs into the art-making ether.
It’s a turnoff at first, but beauty becomes this band, whether it’s the bare-bones sort (as on 2003’s Young Liars EP) or as expansive as Dear Science. “Halfway Home” opens the disc with the packed-in punk of the Cookie Mountain single “Wolf Like Me,” but soon evolves into a taut, glassy piece of Peter Gabriel bigness. The breezy exhale of “Crying” stands atop a tightly edited drum loop and well-placed curlicues of guitar and horn. On “Dancing Choose,” Tunde Adebimpe raps in a frantic jag, but lets up to give way to an even-keeled chorus. It’s as if TVOTR (or in-band producer David Sitek) has learned to compartmentalize its myriad bits: The grit and pulse come from Afrobeat flourishes and percussion that pops (“Golden Age,“ “Red Dress”); the epic overtones arrive on swells of strings or washes of guitar (“Stork & Owl,” “Family Tree”); and the fantastic complementary croons of Adebimpe and Kyp Malone finally stand at the forefront of the songs.
Organized chaos is a wonderful thing unto itself, but there’s much to be said for simply pretty, and TV on the Radio says it here. Even so, if Cookie Mountain was a cyclone, Dear Science is the eye, and something truly nasty waits on the other side.