TV On the Radio's Nine Types of Light

TV On the Radio Get Romantic on “Nine Types of Light”

By The Burg Staff on Apr. 06, 2011
By Matt Ashare
TV On the Radio may just be the best American band you’ve never heard of. Or not.
After all, the Brooklyn band’s last album, 2008’s “Dear Science,” led critics on such a desperate grasp for superlatives that the disc wound up at the very top of year-end lists in Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, and The Guardian. Even the wiseacres at The Onion and the snarky kids at Pitchfork had to agree.
     Perhaps TVOTR’s landslide 2008 “victory” was something of a belated prize for a masterfully mercurial musical entity who’d shape-shifted their way through the art-schooled, new-wavy experiments of 2003’s “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” before scaling to very nearly uncharted electro-organic terrain three years later on the unsettlingly gorgeous “Return to Cookie Mountain.” (A huge collective sigh of relief: America has found an answer to Radiohead, or something like that.) But “Dear Science,” with its seamless, yet expansive conflations of pixelated programming, oblique beats, skewed-soul, Eno-esque atmospherics, and slanted guitar riffs — not to mention the horn and string section embellishments — really was that good. It was remarkably easy listening from a willfully difficult band; it was The Future of Music, or at least one very compelling blueprint for The Future of Rock.
     All of which has created quite a bit of anticipation among those in the know for TVOTR’s forthcoming “Nine Types of Light” (out this Tuesday, April 12). That may explain why the band alighted from Brooklyn to record the new disc in LA. No worries, though: TVOTR apparently eschewed fun-in-the-sun Cali and spent the better part of an introspective month toiling away in resident producer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek’s left coast home studio exploring the various facets of unrequited love. In fact, “Nine Types of Light” might just as easily have been titled “Seven Shades of Blue,” such is the dominant tone of the album.
That’s not to suggest that “Light” is a total downer. The disc opens with deep-voiced Tunde Adembipe casually confiding, “Confidence and ignorance approve me/Define my day, today/I’ve tried so hard to shut it down, lock up, and walk away …” against the sparsest of backdrops (droning strings, a skittering beat, a humming synth tone).
     Adembipe’s internal monologue eventually takes a turn for the defiantly romantic (“While you define/Your heartless time/I’ll defend my love forever …”), but not before surging guitars bring him damn close to transcendence (“And then the light shines/It’s gleaming like a bottle/And love knows I’ll tackle it full throttle/May I illuminate the nameless face of saints of these odd and open graves?”) and Kyp Malone’s insistent falsetto brings “Second Song” to a soulful crescendo.
     And then Adembipe really shows his hand on the disc’s first single, the thumping, measured, melodic “Will Do,” crooning in a voice that brings to mind a young Peter Gabriel: “It might be impractical to seek out a new romance/We won’t know the actual if we never take the chance/I’d love to collapse with you and ease you against this song/I think we’re compatible/I see that you think I’m wrong.”
     TVOTR, who play the Jefferson Theatre in Charlottesville this Saturday, are ultimately too excitable to get mired in melancholy. The no-wave, funked-up “No Future Shock” is a furious dance-punk workout; drummer Jallel Bunton’s stuttering beat invents what might be called “skip-hop” on the deep, throbbing, horn-laced “New Cannonball Blues” and “Caffeinated Consciousness” closes out the disc with some serious riff-rocking accentuated by a dreamy, optimistic refrain.
     To say TVOTR are hard to pin down would be an exercise in serious understatement. But it’s no overstatement to suggest TVOTR remain the best — or at very least the most interesting — American band you ought to hear.
Ashare is a freelance writer based in Lynchburg and former music editor for The Boston Phoenix  http://thephoenix.com/boston/music/24496-tv-on-the-radio-return-to-cookie-mountain/
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