TV on the Radio hold an odd place in my musical pantheon. Over the past few years I became, and still am so deeply enamoured with the song ‘Staring at the Sun’ that it’s made it quite hard for me to really listen properly to anything else they’ve done. Every time I tried to listen to ‘Return to Cookie Mountain’, their much-loved 2006 sophomore album, I’d inevitably get halfway through before my brain would click in with the thought ‘you know what, I kinda feel like listening to ‘Staring at the Sun’ again’. And I would. Hell, I’m listening to it right now and I’m supposed to be writing about their new album ‘Dear Science,’ (yes, the comma is intentional). From which you might be able to deduce that there’s nothing of ‘Staring at the Sun’ calibre on here, but you shouldn’t hold that against ‘Dear Science,’ too strongly, for it’s still a very worthwhile release in its own right. And like, ‘Staring at the Sun’ is totally the best song EVA!!1 fo shiz.
Yes, quite.
I hadn’t really been sold on the two previously unveiled songs, ‘Golden Age’ and ‘Dancing Choose’, so I’d started to harbour some reasonable doubts about the album itself. Fortunately TVOTR have come through in spades, producing a surprisingly gentle and pop-laden album that oscillates between straight-up indie rock and pseudo-symphonic ballads on almost a track to track basis. It sounds jarring, and occasionally it can be - the transition from ‘Family Tree’ to ‘Red Dress’ is particularly traumatic - but for the most part it’s a wonderfully sequenced, and occasionally quite emotive set of songs that probably constitutes their most listenable album to date.
It’s hard to know what hardcore TVOTR fans will make of ‘Dear Science,’ though; a lot of their more grating art-rock tendencies have been honed back and as a result they’ve begun to sound like a more musically detailed version of the Bloc Party. And there is definitely a feeling that ‘Dear Science,’ is a little more insubstantial than their previous releases. However, this isn’t to say that this TVOTR is totally unrecognisable from the band that produced the first two albums. Tunde Adebimpe’s vocals still cut across the songs with an odd mixture of desperation and warmth, while the persistence of the drums and the fuzziness of the production gives all their music a very distinctive texture. But there has definitely been a shift towards pop’s cleaner sounds on this album (which seems to be a bit of a recurring theme this year - it felt like both CSS and Wolf Parade did the same), which is invariably going to disappoint some people. But I must say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve listened to and enjoyed ‘Dear Science,’ over the past couple of days… even if it’s probably not going to be immediately jostling for a slot in my albums of the year. Which I’m sure will upset TVOTR no end.
‘Dear Science,’ is out on the 23rd of September via Interscope in the US and 4AD everywhere else. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to ‘Staring at the Sun’ again. Sigh. It makes everything ok.
-luke
http://www.7digital.com/artists/tv-on-the-radio/dear-science/
you can pre-order the album for £5 here…good stuff
i think staring at the sun is the song for the people who want to add tv on the radio to their favourite music list.
if you REALLY liked tv on the radio, you’d be sick of that song by now.
i’ll wear that
still, i haven’t seen too many persuasive arguments that they’ve done better since. old as it may be, it still seems to be the best single song they’ve done. and hey, i got memory attached to it, you’d have to extract that shit from my head with a crowbar.