Top Ten Albums 2008: TV On The Radio - Dear Science

MICROPSIA - Top Ten Album of the Year

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What does it actually feel like to be haunted? Children, squealing with delight at Halloween stories, think it's kind of fun. Horror movie makers portray the experience as a series of startles, full of crisis and romance. In reality, everybody lugs around a few ghosts, some personally generated, others inherited. We dance, fight and make love with them grabbing at our wrists.

"Dear Science," the third album from the Brooklyn-based art rock band TV on the Radio, is a vivid, angry, sensual soundtrack to the haunted life. A leading cult band in the post-Radiohead era, when cult rock is an end unto itself, TVOTR digs out some hooks from the deeply layered mulch of its sound on "Dear Science." The "ba ba ba" vocal line in the album's opener, "Halfway Home," and the bratty electroclash beats and rap-punk ranting on "Dancing Choose" are just two examples of the sunlight now hitting the band's deep post-punk noise-collage grooves.

But TVOTR's take on pop is still highly intellectual, more connected to Warhol's Factory than to the Brill Building or Timbaland's Virginia Beach, Va., studio. For this quintet, more accessible songcraft isn't an end in itself as much as an entryway into new thematic territory. If past efforts found beauty in urban decay and post-millennial tension, "Dear Science" takes a risk on the opposite impulse: exploring how desire and the drive toward self-expression survive in an America that's falling apart.

Singer-songwriter Kyp Malone gets explicit on "Lover's Day," a long, heavy come-on that would be a dirty blues if not for its chamber-pop arrangement. That might be a bagpipe in there along with the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra horns or just a twist of guitarist-producer Dave Sitek's knobs. Either way, it's a clever reworking of the usual musical seduction. Tunde Adebimpe, the band's other vocalist and main songwriter, gives his longing a more gentlemanly cast on "Family Tree," whose resonant string arrangement lends a Victorian sheen to a melancholy marriage proposal.

In the lyrics, Adebimpe refers to the "gallows of your family tree" -- a gothic image that means more when considered in the light of an old folk song, the hanged man's lament "Gallows Tree," and the history of lynching that it invokes. Four of TVOTR's members are black, and more than ever on this funk-infected set, its music reflects the struggle to love, hope and speak truth that all compassionate people face in a society that hasn't outlived the legacy of those hangings.

On "Dear Science," TVOTR embraces emotions of the here and now -- lust, anger, the dancer's bliss -- but still asks us to honor the ancestors whose grip we can't shake off.

--Ann Powers (Los Angeles Times)