Album Review

TV on the Radio has already received a great deal of critical praise for their most recent LP, Dear Science. You can check me off the list of reviewers saluting the Brooklyn group with a set of hyperbolic adjectives meant to convince readers to drop their $9.99 on iTunes for this record. So that you don’t get sick with all the positivity here, I’m going to keep my praise slim, however: It’s good. Listen to it.

The first song, “Halfway Home,” with its Ramones-esque bah-bah-bah opening, its epic background buzz, and its get-happy clapping, well, its tough not to start grinning just a few bars in. Balance this with a slow spoken-word lyric and some orchestral synths, and you’ve got the kind of song you wished had been playing at the end of all those John Hughes movies.

Not that TVOR sound exclusively 80s. Their influences seem solidly grounded in Reagan-era pop and post-punk, but these guys have convincingly (convincing me for the first time, at least) secured their spot in a wider continuum of avant-garde rock. It’s as if you could lift hair-metal, grunge, and that embarrassing Korn-Limp-Bizkit nonsense out of the way and see an unbroken chain of musicians trying to make music that pleases the brain as well as moves the dancefloor.

Listen to “Crying,” the album’s second track, with its Prince-meets-Eno sound and wowee Casio coda. If after that you’re concerned these gentlemen have turned their ears from advances in music in the last twenty years, listen to the hip-hop-infused “Dancing Choose,” the first of a few tunes with political implications. The lyric follows a “newspaper man” that sounds eerily like the Beatles’ own famous square in blinders. About the time you get to the mournful staccato of “Stork & Owl,” you may be aware of the insistent fuzz that hasn’t left the album’s background, that same warm sound we get from putting a needle to a record’s dusty grooves.

“Golden Age,” a decidedly up-beat if down-tempo song, features a pop-and-lock rhythm and one of those choruses that is usually accompanied by a great deal of skipping in an otherworldly sunshine. “Red Dress” is one of the more dance-oriented songs I’ve heard with such a decidedly apocalyptic theme — a tune whose only distant relative may be Bowie’s epic “Station to Station.”

I could go on. Every song here seems essential, timely, and as approachable for mainstream listeners as it is challenging for artier types. So go get it. And while I’m telling you what to do: REGISTER TO VOTE.