Tv On The Radio - Alien gospel for the 2000s

“Tradition is the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes”

(Gustav Mahler)

The chaos of the metropolis, the pulse of a black heart. Manhattan under snow in the dead of December, with the African sun in its soul. And then the future, terrifying and fascinating: anthropomorphic machines capable of joy, alien temples resounding with mechanical spirituals. New forms of humanity, new forms of prayer. Translated into music: Tv On The Radio, one of the most original groups to emerge from that perennial musical breeding ground that is New York. With all due respect to extraordinary bands like Liars and Black Dice, the spirit of the Big Apple in the 2000s is captured in the sound engineered by Tunde Adebimpe, Andrew Sitek, Kyp Malone, Gerard Smith and Jaleel Bunton.

Chaotic and elegant, cold and mathematical on the outside yet emotional and deep at its core, the music of the New York quintet stands out for its originality and stylistic daring: in years of carbon-copy new wave and post-rock of post-rock, Tv On The Radio have managed to return to the roots of Black popular music (the blues — not the twelve bars, but the feeling of nostalgia and sorrow that drives a man to sing; the soul, the music of the soul's happiness and the body's affirmation of its own physicality), charging them with the futuristic sensibility of the paranoid funk-punk of Talking Heads, the cerebral glam of Roxy Music, the electronic pop of Eno and Bowie, and the chiaroscuro flashes of the shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine and Spacemen 3.

A sonic melange that could have produced a monster, but which instead has asserted itself in all its brilliance at the forefront of the musical proposals of recent years. The bands recycling post-punk have stopped to worship the ashes, while Tv On The Radio have kept burning that sacred fire that belonged to the greats.

The band's "hard core" is made up of Kyp Malone (vocals), Tunde Adebimpe (guitar and vocals) — who also pursues a parallel career as an actor and director in American independent cinema — and Andrew Sitek, a multi-instrumentalist and producer, as well as a talented photographer and painter.

The three formed Tv On The Radio in 2001, the year before the official debut of Ok Calculator (self-released, 2002). This embryonic release, polemically dedicated to the Radiohead-ian revolution of "Ok Computer", is accordingly divided into on-the-road recordings of amateurish a cappella singing ("Netti Fritti", "Me – I", "Buffalo Girls", "Los Mataban", "Yr God", "Y King"), techno-style r'n'b ("Say You Do", "Robots", "Ending Of A Show", "Hurt You"), electro-percussive instrumentals ("Pulse Of Pete", "Doing My Duty") and their skewed hybrids thereof ("Bycicles Are Red Hot", the only true seed of "Desperate Youth", and "Sheka Baby"). The 16 minutes of "On A Train", a diaphanous lo-fi drape, are their tribute to ambient techno.

The career of Tv On The Radio actually begins with the EP Young Liars (Touch & Go, 2003), a more convincing preview of the major works to come, thanks to the whirling "Satellite" (with intermittent electronic miasmas), the first version of "Staring At The Sun", the ambient, elegiac "Blind" and the alienated swing, awash in avalanches of shoegaze, of the title track. The Pixies-esque version of "Mr Grieves" in Bobby McFerrin style still illustrates the spartan divertissement of "Ok Calculator".

From Young Liars onward, the lineup would expand thanks to the additions, first temporary and then permanent, of two other highly skilled multi-instrumentalists: Gerard Smith and Jaleel Bunton. One white member and four black members, Tv On The Radio are also, in musical form, a mirror of the ethnic, linguistic and cultural melting pot of today's New York society.

The album that reveals them to the world, earning positive responses from both critics and audiences, is Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (Touch & Go, 2004). It's a record that's not yet fully mature, but whose stylistic approach certainly doesn't leave you indifferent, even if it doesn't hit home on first listen: the music of Tv On The Radio is in fact charged with a restrained positive energy, which rarely overflows to overwhelm the listener, preferring instead to subtly work its way under the skin. It's the symbol of the youthful need to communicate one's own existence and the impossibility of doing so in an age of invasive mass-media proliferation. And so, bring on the alien dances, as sensual and delightful as they are restless.

The album opens with a lethal triptych: it kicks things off with "The Wrong Way", one of their irresistible implosive boogies for the desperate youth of the third millennium, whose arrangement (harmonic embroidery of flutes and keyboards, with saxophone pouring further fuel on the rhythmic fire of the drums) leaves you stunned. It continues with "Staring At The Sun", a majestic synthesis of ambient music and vintage pop, and "Dreams", another apotheosis of murky atmospheres (the harmonic interplay of keyboards in the background) interrupted by sudden flashes of light (the electric discharges of the guitars). Another gem is "Ambulance", a track sung a cappella by three voices, one soloist and two choruses, chasing each other through tight counterpoints and daring polyphonies, meeting halfway between the Beach Boys' pop motets and the freedom songs of early-20th-century American black slaves. Also worth appreciating are "Bomb Yourself", a formidable futuristic take on the art-rock of Wire and Television, "Poppy" and "Wear You Out".

The album's limitation, looking closely, lies in pushing the "Staring At The Sun" formula too hard in a few tracks ("King Eternal" and "Don't Love You"), which risk tipping into monotony. Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is certainly no masterpiece, but, unlike many contemporary records passed off as such, it isn't a mere "copy and paste" of the musical stylings fashionable in the early Eighties.

Tv On The Radio keep one eye on new wave (Killing Joke, New Order, Ultravox), while with the other they explore the various traditional musical languages of Black Americans, and with their minds they travel toward the future. In 2004, however, the time wasn't yet ripe for the result of their alchemy to be perfect. The task of completing this synthesis would fall to the musical enzymes — revitalizing for rock as a whole — contained in that towering masterpiece that goes by the name of Return To Cookie Mountain (4AD, 2006).

A masterpiece released in 2006 on a major label like 4AD, which definitively thrust the New York band to the center of the decade's musical landscape. The formula of Return To Cookie Mountain isn't all that different from that of the previous record, except that there's no trace of naivety or dips in tension: every stylistic element is blended with coherence, skill and greater personality. By now no one else carries the sonic trademark of Tv On The Radio, and trying to pigeonhole their music into a pre-existing genre is a flawed exercise. This work, too, is riddled with futuristic, autistic r'n'b ("I Was A Lover", "Hours") and elegant, androgynous soul ("Dirtywhirl"), as well as robotic, crescendo-building hymns ("Province", featuring David Bowie as a special guest). What also stands out, though, are the guitar parts, especially in terms of tone and effects: still reminiscent of shoegaze guitars, but with a more saturated, "material" sound.

After the opening trio of tracks, viscous and enveloping, the album picks up speed thanks to the frenetic breakbeat of "Playhouses", culminating in the werewolf boogie of "Wolf Like Me": the drums scramble to chase themselves, the keyboards stretch out into sci-fi atmospheres, the washes of guitar ensnare the rasping baritone sax. Naturally, there's no shortage of those liberating chants, those secular exorcisms of modern paranoia that make up the album's emotional climax: "Method", which uses vocal polyphonic interplay over a rhythmic base of synthetic and "concrete" percussive jolts, and "Let The Devil In", a true techno-primitive ritual that culminates in a collective shout of joy, rage and love.

Another of their peaks is "Blues From Down Here", in which Malone delivers a passionate vocal (a blues) set against a rhythmic backdrop made up of an understated yet gripping drum part, over which daring harmonies of voices, synths and horns intertwine. "Tonight", a nocturnal gospel ode to the magnificence of the moon with a distorted deluge of guitars and bucolic clarinet, paves the way for the closing "Wash The Day", a track with industrial and trip-hop veins, caught between the claustrophobic obsession of a catatonic beat and the vital energy radiating from the electrified strings of guitars and sitar.

Alien gospel, nuclearized soul, future blues, emaciated shoegaze, scraps of funk, psychedelia and new wave: Return To Cookie Mountain will be remembered as a miraculous and coherent amalgam, unprecedented and unheard-of, of disparate styles.

The follow-up to this masterpiece, two years later, is titled Dear Science (Interscope / 4AD, 2008), an album that converts the digital-shoegaze mix of Return To Cookie Mountain into a new form of kitsch sound. On Dear Science the sounds thicken to Spector-esque levels of an admirable wall of sound, which no longer makes any distinction between electronics, mixed percussion, beats, strings, horns and a cappella voices.

That doesn't mean their proverbial sonic psychosis fades away. "Shout Me Out" is a magical sound-collage (which also contains surgically precise dynamic shifts) aiming to unite the calm of Paul Simon with the alienated vaudeville of Xtc, going so far as to build an ideal bridge between their previous album and a kind of total sonic scenography. In "Dancing Choose", a cha-cha mixed with rumba mixed with a drum'n'bass of mounting groove competes for center stage amid countless arrangement tricks. In "Shout Me Out", set off by a vocal-group skit (almost recalling the zaniness of the Drifters), the schizophrenic mood swings between a punk-locomotive sprint played against the beat and a seraphic soul lullaby à la Terry Callier.

But an even more precise demonstration of style, elegance and class lies above all in a restructured, even unprecedented singer-songwriter ambition, as can be appreciated in the ballads of "Stork & Owl", a crescendo-building procession reminiscent of the early Bad Seeds, held in check by a controlled sorrow. "Love Dog", solemn, overflows with arrangement (to the point of overwhelming everything else), while "Crying" bets everything on effect-laden stereo imaging to elevate Adebimpe's lyricism, before dissolving into a curious orchestral-digital second half. "Lover's Day", a proud anthem and jovial march, pushes their new maximalism to a point of no return, while "Family Tree", a piano elegy, caresses reverbs and rhythmic pulses, a cappella whispers and baroque-pop melody straight out of "Pet Sounds". The most dispensable, "Red Dress", twists a cut-rate funk into carnivalesque registers à la Fall.

Halfway between these approaches, the band's fusion also aims to perfect a form of futuristic black music: "Golden Age" is a falsetto funky ballad à la Cody ChesnuTT that builds momentum from tonal wobbles and resolves into a dissolute festival of voices, brass and digital counterpoints; on "DLZ" the soul framework becomes a mere hallucination, while the body of the sonic architecture becomes the duel between voice, production and electronic post-production.

An absurd demonstration of the solidity of Tv On The Radio's original, almost doctrinal sound is a record produced in grandiloquent fashion by a Sitek acting as sole master and commander — who dazzles in every direction, from retro melodies worthy of soul greats as well as AR Kane-style transfigurations, to numerous phrases delivered with imperious pomp. Adebimpe too clears his throat with rare clarity, and Malone holds his own alongside him. As with the classics, it can be read on several levels at once: as self-satisfied, almost easy listening, as the fullest exploration of their (vast) potential, or as a chaotic jumble of unorthodox brachylogies in musical form; not least, a tracklist of paradisiacal perfection. It was presented on the David Letterman Show, with a live version of "Dancing Choose", on September 26, 2008.

After the solo projects of Kyp Malone (under the name Rain Machine) and ringleader Dave Sitek (as Maximum Balloon), Tv On The Radio return to the studio for Nine Types Of Light (2011), an album that contains some genuine tweaks to their sound (though, unfortunately, no innovations in any absolute sense). There are new records of chameleon-like shape-shifting ("Second Song", "Killer Crane", "No Future Shack") that open the door to citations, to personal takes on fun, and even to an unprecedented form of ecstasy, alongside more dynamic songs like "New Cannonball Run" and "Will Do", whose arrangements either spill over into confusion or simply lack the hallmarks of a hit. The one moment that recalls Pere Ubu is entrusted to the psychotic coda of "Repetition", while the two-pronged "Caffeinated Consciousness" alternates near-symphonic rap-rock with sugary soul-pop verses.

Here the Sitek-Adebimpe duo makes the album feel like a contest of skills: the former, a sophisticated producer, runs through his entire bag of tricks (beats, crystalline guitars, rubbery basslines, keyboards, even banjo and scraps of folktronica), but occasionally veers into ugliness and loses his grip on chaos. The latter, an eclectic vocalist, stretches his voice in every direction, though it doesn't always have bite. A collection that stands out for plenty of reasons and impresses, but doesn't quite strike at the heart.

Immediately after the album's release, Tv On The Radio lose bassist Gerard Smith, struck down by lung cancer. The tragic event shakes the band to its core: their first move is to tear up their contract with Interscope and start rethinking their very reason for being.

It's Sitek, increasingly the acknowledged leader, who takes charge of the situation. The following work, Seeds, is thus very much his own creation, one that overshadows the rest of the band to the point of reducing them to a sham outfit (aside from the two explosive tracks "Lazzerray" and "Winter"). Only the long, ambitious "Ride" manages to fuse the magic of the production with a rediscovered band identity. However, it's the New York outfit's first minor record, too similar to itself, with too many songs that reek of tired routine and often slide into self-imitation.

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