POP
The album held at its core ideals scarce in most bands at that time, confronting listeners with a rejection of the mainstream. Constantly changing shape and seemingly unable to cohere into an entirely definable prospect, TV On The Radio embody what is great about the potential of music, relentlessly offering glimpses into the musical psyche of countless cultures.
This is something Adebimpe sees as intrinsic to the nature of the band when I meet them. "I can never understand why, when there is so much recorded music out there, that you would limit yourself," says Adebimpe. "If you just stick your head out you are going to be bombarded by all these different sounds and cultures. But it seems some people are just like, 'no I can't listen to that. That's not in the box'."
Across 11 tracks, their latest record, Dear Science, fuses shadowy electronic rhythms, disco-funk, Afrobeat and hip-hop. Layered vocal melodies sprawl throughout each track. It is a hypnotic trip with the distortion toned down, replaced by violins and lulling orchestral moments that encase the record with elegant textures. The result is the most beautiful thing the band has produced to date. It is a record with resolve at its heart and a peculiar sense of joy, something Adebimpe says was a deliberate act.
"It is easy to find negative emotions," he says. "But it isn't a place I want to stay for long because it impedes too much. For me, the best function for negative feelings is to put them in a place where I can look at them objectively and say, 'you are just a song. You might be a beautiful, sad song, but you are a song and not the thing that is going to make me toss myself out a window'. Just knowing I can do that, whether it be joy or sadness, and transform it into something that can be shared with someone else and offer comfort, like great music, art and literature has for me: that is great."
The band's previous album Return to Cookie Mountain articulated an intense dissatisfaction with a world that seemed loveless and self-consumed, with America depicted as a wasteland stupefied by war and natural disasters. This socio-political edge has taken on oblique lyrical forms, but has always been at the heart of each of the band's records and it is a trend continued on Dear Science, which despite moments of elation is pervaded by concerns about the future, something Adebimpe sees as inevitable.
"I think until world events come to a utopian place, politics will always sink into the music we make," he says. "If music is a place to organise thoughts to prevent them cycling around your head, then that always happens. You see things in the news and it is such a tragedy that it is absurd to you. You see the chain of human events that led to someone's suffering. You know they are just people, spores and molecules, but it is other people making this shit. I can't see how someone with knowledge of history would allow certain things to happen, except for personal profit, which seems even more mystifying given the fact everybody is going to die. I walk around thinking I can shut that out, but some things you just can't."
Lyrically the album is complex with credits split between the frontman Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, the guitarist. The lines articulate a post-modern malaise and a yearning to engage with a world that often bemuses them with its logic. This is highlighted when Malone talks about the reference to science in the album title.
"I don't want to take an anti-science position, but science and technology are meant to be helping us progress, but end up screwing us and the planet," he says. "Look at the science of medicine and finding cures. That isn't the focus anymore because that system of inquiry is tied to free market capitalism. Why find a cure for something when you can make money off keeping people alive and treating their illnesses with medication they have to pay for."
Malone is serious and considered when he speaks. Adebimpe, on the other hand, laughs and jokes as he describes his lyrics as a form of meditation. "It sounds simplistic but what I write is based on a life experience, filtered through a process," says Adebimpe. "You could write a story that says I was surfing the web, got sick of myself and so I went to a bar; and then I got sick of the people there and hated them as much as I hated myself; so I went home and fell asleep disgusted with myself. 'Dancing Choose' in many ways is that song. It is an extract with lines thrown together that hopefully works as well as a poem does, and gives enough of a description of a scene."
The production on Dear Science is a marvel and at its heart is the band's architect, Sitek. He is a man much written about, connected with bohemian hipness, but by his own admission far from the epitome of cool so many attach to him. His drowsy eyes struggle, hidden behind thick black rimmed glasses, and a beer belly is apparent. His voice, a smoky New York drawl, immediately echoes around the room as he voices his opinions on the state of the music industry.
"Our interests lie far beyond what we have done before," he says. "I think a lot of bands suffer this way, because even if they are forward-thinking, there are a lot of people around them that want the opposite. All of the fabulous 'cool' people will go away, and the band doesn't want to take any risks. For us, it could come or go. To be in a band with a bunch of people who don't care whether the last success is repeated makes us very free. We are in our thirties and less susceptible to people who say, 'if you guys do this, here is a golden ticket'. We don't believe there is a golden ticket."
Sitek says that it comes down to what your goals are, and TV On The Radio's goals are purely musical, and not financial. "We have watched the fabulous people blow us by and there is always going to be some next big thing. This obsession with new bands is a product of that because so many bands aspire to do the same thing over and over which necessitates wanting a new band. People can't imagine a band who had a hit record doing something totally different. No matter how much attention is being paid to you, you know it is not going to last. A lot of bands start with the mentality that they are owed something. I say it time and time again: the only time success comes before work is in the dictionary."
Sitek's Stay Gold studio is the hub of the Williamsburg scene, filled with vintage instruments and recording equipment that has attracted a slew of local bands such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, Celebration as well as Oxford five piece Foals, with whom Sitek worked on their debut album - an experience he speaks about candidly. "I did that record, and the record I made is not the record you hear. It is a wildly different record. They are still in pursuit of something they haven't found yet, which is okay. What I think they need to do is completely different to what they actually did.
"That is all fine if it is replaced with a vision they are entirely happy with, but it turns out they weren't happy with it. They should just have just let it be what it was intended to be and lived or died by the sword. I love them as people and they have so much potential, but they are too worried what people think and what they think. The only error in the situation was that they didn't reflect the work they had done with me. Instead, a lot of what was written was them discarding what they did with me. There is no way in hell if I was a band I would work with me if I thought I didn't want a lot of reverb or space or weird stuff. I would be the worst bet ever. When they said it sounded too spacey I was like, 'who the hell did you think you were working with?'!"
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