(4AD/Remote Control)

Not an album about the cost of the Large Hadron Collider…

Despite a greater accessibility to a variety of music in this age of the internets, you can still probably count the number of releases worth looking forward to each calendar year on the fingers of one hand. A new album by TV On The Radio meets the criteria more than anything else in 2008 (last year it was Radiohead – I’m a stereotype, sue me), and yes, it delivers. Already much has been made of the band’s ‘happier’ sound on this record – heck, it opens with surf rock doo-wop – but it’s not like they’ve gone all Bernard Sumner-on-Prozac a la Electronic’s Raise The Pressure. Tunde Adebimp and Kyp Malone’s lyrics are as tense, political and accusatory as ever, especially on Shout Me Out, DLZ and Red Dress, which features the brilliantly frustrated opening line “Hey Jackboot! Fuck your war! / Cause I’m fat and in love and no bombs are fallin’ on me for sure / But I’m scared to death that I’m livin’ a life not worth dying for.” It’s the music and delivery that carries the sense of renewed joy for the most part – for example, Kyp gets his Bowie and Prince mojo on for Crying and the anthemic Golden Age, and his ‘romp’ track Lover’s Day is so positively sexually-charged it should be blasted out at anti-war rallies. Similarly, Dave Sitek’s production has reached a new level of sublime layering here, ensuring that TVOTR’s inexplicable mix of punk-funk, digital bleeps, fractured rhythms, art rock and soul continues to work brilliantly despite the seemingly incompatible elements. Best of all, it sounds modern – that is, something new, risky, and reflective of the crazy time in which it was made. People can write extended intellectual waffle about the band’s ‘post-racial’ nature, about how they’ve reconfigured no wave sax skronk into futurist funk pop (or something), and thankfully none of it will obscure the most important thing about TV On The Radio – that they’re worth getting excited for.

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TOPHER HEALY

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