Dear Science is TV on the Radio's most consistent album

The band expands its sound on its sonically rich and engrossing third album.

By Jordan Sargent

Published Sept. 29, 2008

TV on the Radio has always been a city band made for city people. The band's first album and EP sounded disturbed and rattled by urbanity, with vocalists Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone singing in ghostly falsettos over skittering drum machines, walls of guitar noise and numbing, formless synthesizers.

On 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain, the band fine-tuned its sound, adding a human drummer and aiming for songs that were either mainstream rock or purposefully damaged mainstream rock. It's been hailed as the definitive record of post-9/11 urbanity, and it's hard to listen to the album and not think that TV on the Radio wanted us to feel like the apocalypse was only tightening its grip.

The album's most arresting songs, "A Method," "Province" and "Dirtywhirl," are spare and desolate (but also hauntingly huge) like an abandoned city, built on elements like solitary handclaps, martial drums, shards of guitar squall and off-kilter pianos. But, as is TV on the Radio's strength, the best songs are unflinchingly beautiful. Adebimpe and Malone write about love as if the world has either just ended or just restarted, matching the music's primal dystopia with lyrics where lovers are wolves and dogs prowling a crumbled world.

As you might imagine though, TVOTR sometimes folds in on itself on Cookie Mountain. Some songs, like "Blues from Down Here" and "Tonight" don't really go anywhere. Others sound like aborted Nine Inch Nails tracks.

It's a relief then that Dear Science, TV on the Radio's third full-length, is its most sonically rich and engrossing album. The band has continued to grow in numbers and in prowess, and on Dear Science its members dive into sounds that they've never hinted at: spurting horn charts and soaring string arrangements, funky guitar licks that drip sweat and strutting bass lines that single-handedly try to resurrect James Brown. It doesn't mean that they've abandoned drum machines or noise, but maybe they've realized that unfettered getting it on is just as primal as desperate death-rattle.

Opener "Halfway Home" is stunning but conventional as far as this band goes, so the record doesn't really kick into gear until the second song, "Crying," which sees a culture-sick Malone cooing about revolution over scratchy funk guitars and horns that blast with cautious optimism.

The following song, "Dancing Choose," rides chaotic verses into erupting choruses and eventually builds up into one of the album's finest releases. "Stork & Owl," a dark, looping ballad, sounds too much like something from the band's past, but the breathtaking "Family Tree" is the best Coldplay song never written.

The album's second half, where creep and dread seep into the band's songs as they have on previous releases, is its strongest. Everything about the twitching "Red Dress" is a glorious, sloppy mess until the band locks into a great near-disco drum groove. "Love Dog," a lover-as-animal metaphor, recalls the forlorn prettiness of Adebimpe's best songs.

On "DLZ," which has a hypnotizing drum beat that evokes "Province," Adebimpe goes from singing about "the long-winded blues of the never" to "the dawn of the luz forever." That optimism bleeds into finale "Lover's Day," which ends with a joyful Sufjan Stevens-esque horn arrangement after Malone sings about face-melting sex.

Not only is Dear Science TV on the Radio's most consistent and complete album, but it's the best because it's the group's first album that sounds as calamitous and explosive as the apocalypse, love, sex and ruin that they so vividly sing about.