When I heard the new TV On The Radio album, "Dear Science", I got to the point where I am completely satisfied with this year in music. I have no complaints; 2008 has had everything. We've had great albums by elders (Tom Petty, Nick Cave), a new band actually worth its buzz (Fleet Foxes), a successfully challenging pop record (Coldplay), a great band revived from the dead (Portishead), and a sleeper classic that nobody heard (Bon Iver). It doesn't even matter if anything good comes out in the next three months. Now, for the second time this year (the first being the Hold Steady), we have a band following up a masterpiece with another masterpiece.
What's really impressive is that TV On The Radio do it completely different this time. In 2006, Return To Cookie Mountain was brooding indie rock that had flourishes of soul and funk, but it relied much more on its David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails influence. Dear Science (I know, horrible title and horrible cover art) is Brooklyn's update on Prince's Sign O' The Times; it might stray into other areas, but it's purpose is to make you dance.
On the opener "Halfway Home", they take an unexpected shot at stadium rock with soaring guitars and a "ba ba ba ba" Beach Boys chorus. Then on "Crying" and "Dancing Choose" they bring the funk and soul; the latter even has rapping that is so frantic you almost don't realize how bad the rhyming is. "Stork & Owl" is a beautiful ballad with dubbed voices and plucked strings; at this point, they sound like they could be the next Coldplay (I mean that as a compliment). It's very rare that a band can cover this much ground in four tracks.
The rest of the record doesn't match the intensity of the first four tracks, but nothing can. "Family Tree" is a great soul ballad that probably needs to be a minute shorter. "Shout Me Out" probably could have been left off the album. However, the last two tracks bring it all home: "DLZ" is as dark and intense as Nine Inch Nails recent work, and "Lover's Day" is an epic that sounds like an end-of-the-war march with kitchen sink instrumentation.
Will this album take them to the mainstream? Probably not. There isn't room on the radio for anything this challenging. There is no band alive right now that crosses genres and races like TV On The Radio. You could list the influences for hours: Prince, Outkast, Marvin Gaye, Nine Inch Nails, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, the Pixies...they are all part of this band's world.
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