So you call them art-rock in the way you do when a band has all these little recognizable parts making up an overall sound that is, more or less, totally unrecognizable. TV On The Radio have touched on or incorporated bits and pieces of all of them, often weaving them together in a way where you’d never call them out immediately. There is no way this should work it should be all over the place. You could almost list whatever genre you want, and it’d make sense: doo-wop, electronica, hip-hop, New Wave, post-rock, post-punk, various strands of art-rock, and so on. Both Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone’s vocal styles are, let’s say, unconventional, and both are crucial to the identity of the band. There’s also the fact that the band is just inherently strange, inescapably unique. Foreign and exotic, yes, but also distant and not entirely legible. That might seem minute, but TV On The Radio are at the forefront of bands that defined the “Brooklyn indie” thing, and as that became more commodified and ossified, they on one hand seemed more authentic, but also inevitably began to seem of another time and place. One is that between Dear Science and Nine Types Of Light, there was a turnover into a new decade. Dear Science seemed like it was everywhere, and then in the overnight period of the three years that elapses between albums these days, TV On The Radio suddenly felt like a reliable stalwart, the sort of band that was going to keep cranking out reliably strong material, but that people just weren’t foaming at the mouth for anymore.Īside from the cruel and rapid passage of time in the 21st century, there are probably two other factors to consider. (For comparison points, #2 was an entry in Bob Dylan’s bootleg series, and #5 was John Mellencamp.) That is some serious top-of-the-heap status when it comes to a band as idiosyncratic and art-rock as TV On The Radio. There was some serious universality to this in the media, too: Even Rolling Stone named it the #1 album of the year. Return To Cookie Mountain was well regarded in a lot of end-of-year lists in 2006, and come 2008, Dear Science topped many of the same lists. But consider that up until Nine Types Of Light, each TV On The Radio LP had been one of the major, most discussed releases of their respective years. It’s 2014, and reigns are shorter than ever. Or that when they did surprise them, it was because they had decided to write more conventional songs.Īny way you look at it, there’s also the inescapable fact that these things move fast. But maybe we took the experimentation for granted - perhaps not inconsequently, a similar narrative could be ascribed to Radiohead’s arc in recent years - and people just didn’t know how to react when TV On The Radio didn’t, well, shock them. Maybe it’s not that we took the band themselves for granted - they’re clearly extremely talented artists. This could perhaps be partially traced to the fact that, after three preceding albums over which the band continued to fake us all out and leap into different dimensions each time, Nine Types Of Light was the first TV On The Radio release made up of a bunch of songs that, conceivably, wouldn’t have been too far out of place on the preceding album. People liked it, but it didn’t dominate the conversation necessarily. ![]() After spending a few albums as reigning indie darlings and as one of the bands deemed suitable for the title of “the American Radiohead,” Nine Types Of Light seemed to go rather quietly. Why, though? Have we taken the band for granted? It certainly seems that way. It will be the band’s first LP since 2011’s Nine Types Of Light, a strong collection that somehow never quite got its due. Tunde Adebimpe and David Andrew Sitek were the only TV on the Radio members to play on this track, with guest appearances from Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs on guitar and Katrina Ford of Celebration on backing vocals.Earlier today, TV On The Radio announced the fall 2014 release of their fifth album, Seeds. The song is recognizable by its heavy fuzz bass line, and rapidly strummed, distorted guitar single notes. The song was listed at #41 on Pitchfork Media's "Top 500 songs of the 2000s".īand member Dave Sitek has said that the song was written over the course of two days. The single's B-sides, "Freeway" and "On a Train", were taken from their OK Calculator release. The CD single is enhanced with two different quality QuickTime video files of the title track's music video. ![]() " Staring at the Sun" is the debut single of American indie rock band TV on the Radio, released in 2004.
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