The Age of Miracles, The Age of Sound…

When TV on the Radio released Dear Science on 23 September 2008, I was immediately obsessed. I listened to it on repeat for weeks, and then to certain songs daily for months more. This is by a wide margin the album I have most wanted to rewind review this year, and it is, by an even wider margin, one of my absolute fondest, most favoritest albums ever recorded. I know every word and every musical moment of every track. I poured over every piece of information and interview the band was willing to do surrounding it, read every review, both those heaping flowery praise and those (very small few) that didn’t. I mined every detail and I love, love, love talking about it, so I cannot wait for this.

Dear Science

TV on the Radio

Art Rock | 2008

Sometime in 2005, a Brooklyn band, barely recognized as more than a dark, experimental, art rock side project for the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s producer that did an acapella cover of a Pixies song, got a very, very important phone call. Somehow, someway, David Bowie—THE David Bowie—had heard their first album, the spare, atmospheric (and, personally, extremely underrated) Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, and he told them that he wanted in. I can only imagine the mood in the recording space that day being like a cross between Christmas morning and winning the lottery.

That second album, Return to Cookie Mountain, would add a ton of new sounds and influences, including post-punk, wall-of-sound rock & roll, psych-rock, and shoegaze. With Bowie guesting on the song “Province”—which, as an aside, has one of the best cat poster lines ever written, “Love is the province of the brave”—and also throwing his artistic and popular weight behind them, the band released the album in 2006 to massive critical acclaim.

The trick TVOTR would have to master coming off of such radical acclaim, was consistency in their evolution. I love every song from Return to Cookie Mountain, but it would take a lot of bribery for me to say the album was perfect. It showcased everything at which TVOTR was excellent: songwriting, cohesive instrumentation, sonic exploration, the melding of seemingly disparate genres; but also, unfortunately, everything they were not (yet): mixing, production, pacing, and most obviously, editing.

Cookie Mountain is only eleven songs, and under an hour, but it feels like three times that. After listening to it a bunch of times (I told you, I love every song), I think it basically stems from the lack of direction. The songs all seem to come from different albums with different mixes and instrumental palettes: sometimes they’re stark and highly robotic, like songs from their first album; others are the new maximalist, wall-of-sound, shoegaze-inspired art rock. And they’re ordered in a way that either hamstrings the pace with too much slow-down, or jarringly ramps it to 11 before immediately cooling again.

None of this is to say Cookie Mountain is at all bad. In fact, it’s very, very good. It’s just that it’s not perfected. This album, Dear Science, this is perfected. Everything that could possibly be learned from the mistakes of past efforts was processed and resolved to brilliant effect. In the brief two years the band used to work on this project, they took every single detail, refined them, and crafted their magnum opus.

Halfway Home

Dear Science opens with a glorious wash of noisy, shoegaze guitars and perfectly paired synth-horn, its constant bombast resembling an air raid siren more than a brass section, but it’s mixed so beautifully into the surrounding cacophony that you’ll barely notice it’s there. A syncopated rhythm is feverishly clacked out by the drumsticks, snare rims, and seemingly random claps before Tunde Adebimpe’s signature scatting appears like an ominous figure in a thick fog. His first verbal lines are in a half-whisper, at his most calming amidst the widening gyre, delivered in a rhyme scheme that’s equal parts unnerving and enchanting: “The la- / -zy way / you turn / your head / in - to / a rest / stop for / the dead / and did / it all / in gold / and blue / and gray.”

The layers upon layers of sound build until the chorus explodes is a massive release of truly gorgeous synth strings and ocean-sized cymbal crashes, as Tunde’s voice moves to an alien falsetto that’s motivated by sheer desperation: “It it not me? / Am I not folded by your touch? / The words you spoke, I know to much / It’s over now, and not enough / Is it not me? / The damage you hold inside your blush? / The load you towed, you showed it up / It’s over now, and I’m insane.”

The lyrics here, and elsewhere on Dear Science are some of the most brilliant I’ve ever heard. Both lead singer, Tunde Adebimpe, and guitarist/occasional singer, Kyp Malone, both do their finest work painting entire worlds with their words. “Is it not me / Am I not culled into your clutch,” the second iteration of the chorus begins, “The words you spoke, I know too much / We're closer now and said enough.” It becomes obvious the allusion to a halfway house, made by the songs title, is not for the recently incarcerated or for those recovering from addiction, but instead for those leaving this relationship. “Is it not me? / Am I not rolled into your crush? / The road you chose unloads control / See it take me so.”

The band then begins the process of what I can only imagine is destroying every instrument by playing it as fast as possible, before the din is cut off by a whirring, fading doppler sound effect, like the entire song was being whisked away by a speeding train.

Crying

TVOTR’s newfound pacing ability gets shown off right away on the first song transition. After the manic energy of opener “Halfway Home,” “Crying” begins with a smooth, jazz drum shuffle expertly enhanced by the occasional programmed percussive. Then it’s Kyp Malone’s turn on the mic, his expressive vocals wafting over the mix of delicate Rhodes piano and dancey bassline. When his guitar comes in this time, instead of the trademark TVOTR whir of hyper-reverb, it’s finger-picked to Nile Rogers/Chic perfection. His lyrics are some of the most overtly political on the album, though he rarely shies away from such topics (and will become even more obvious later): “Laugh in the face of death under masthead / Hold your breath through late breaking disasters / Next to news of the trite.” He later goes on to propose burning it all down to build a better society from the ashes: “Time to take the wheel and the road from the masters / Take this car, drive it straight into the wall / Build it back up from the floor.”

The choruses are enhanced by bringing in a full brass section, with each occurrence adding more horns and saxophones to the mix until, by the last repetition at song’s end, Kyp is barely audible over the boisterous marching band diverting their route around him. The song ends with a descending synth loop that leads us perfectly into…

Dancing Choose

Just because TVOTR’s album-crafting abilities grew up doesn’t mean they lost their sense of fun. “Dancing Choose” was the biggest single promoting Dear Science, and it’s easy to understand why. A very synth-y bass line opens briefly before Tunde begins rapping a story about a whack flash poser who gets all his political ideas from what op-eds tell him and his sense of fashion from ads. In a scathing critique akin to that of Fight Club, Tunde bemoans the state of culture as one impressed only by what one can buy, rather than by any sort of artistic or extrinsic value. The music is bouncy and simple, giving Tunde ample room to maneuver around his increasingly complex rhyme scheme, which he deftly switches between the lines, “Feast before famine, and more before family,” and, “Goes and shows up with more bowls and more cups.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention everyone’s favorite line, which only a genius goofball like Tunde could invent. In the second iteration of the final chorus, I assume from a lack of decent rhyming words, crafted the line, “I see you figured in your action pose / Foam-injected Axl Rose / Life size.” What Axl Rose has to do with anything I’ll never know, I’m sure there’s a reason. But the line is so wonderful, and so bizarre that it’s impossible to miss or forget.

Stork & Owl

Kyp returns to the mic with perhaps the slowest and definitely the most cerebral of the songs on the record, but it is paired with some of its most sumptuous instrumentation. On “Stork & Owl”, Kyp sing-recites what I can best describe as a formless, lyrical poem. It doesn’t rhyme, and much of it is just painting a scene for you to feel. Its mentions of a conversation about death between the titular, Aesop-esque stork and owl provide some insight that maybe he means to say love is the only thing that can “survive” death. Or maybe it’s that love ending feels like dying? Your guess is as good as mine.

But the picture painted by the strange words works. The feeling of the song is never lost, especially when it’s so magnificently delivered over a bed of sparse, programmed drum loops, and an arrangement of strings so beautiful they can bring actual tears.

Golden Age

David Sitek’s grooving bass and Jaleel Bunton’s chopped up drums create the funkiest beat for maybe the greatest song the band would ever write. Kyp stays on the mic here to do his best Jamie Stewart impression, wavering over his opening lines of “Heart beat sounding, ricocheting in their cage / Thought I'd lose my balance, with the grounds bounce and sway / And all this violence, and all this goes away / And the vibes that rise like fireflies / Illuminate our play.”

There is just so much to love with this song: the playful rhythm, the funkadelic beat, that whenever Kyp sings something about “clap your hands” perfectly timed handclaps enter the mix, or the fact that he sings the words “ghetto blaster.” The chorus is punctuated by that same marching band from “Crying,” back to harry Kyp in full Rose Parade regalia. The song is a celebration of songs and everything that’s good about music. You can’t listen to “Golden Age” and not have a smile on your face and a skip in your step. Conga lines were invented for this sort of thing.

Family Tree

At the close of side A, we find what might be TVOTR’s darkest anthem. “Family Tree” begins with echoed piano played with forceful hits of the keys. Tunde then begins to sing a heartbreaking story about two lovers from different racial backgrounds and the prejudice they face from, first, their own families, then from society as a whole. And while the track is more literally about interracial couples, it is instantly relatable to any couple who has been subjected to discrimination because of their race, gender, or sexuality.

Tunde’s vocals are warm, sung to the person he loves in his lowest register, trying his best to reassure them. And the poetry he delivers with that voice is breathtakingly gorgeous: “The day calls in billows / It’s echoing moonlight on the blue nightmare of you heart;” or later: “Complete your release, unbury your feet / And married we'll be / Alone in receiving ours is a feeling not that they would see / They don't know what we could be / Down where your cradle escaped the sea.”

In the chorus, he is joined by longtime friend of the band, Katrina Ford, and her light voice beautifully floats over Tunde’s baritone as they compare the bigotry of the past to a literal gallows: “We're hanging in the shadow of your family tree / Your haunted heart and me / Brought down by an old idea whose time has come / And in the shadow of the gallows of your family tree / There's a hundred hearts or three / Pumping blood to the roots of evil to keep it young.”

And as the couple escapes their horrific circumstances, the strings and percussion pick up into a more optimistic movement, while the duet continues, “And now we're gathered in the shadow of your family tree / In halted harmony / Brought down by an old idea whose time has come / And in the shadow of the valley of your family tree / There's a hundred hearts or three / Pumping blood to the roots of Eden to keep us young.”

Immaculately produced, bittersweet, and sadly all too relevant, the song, and the album side, ends as the pianos swirl with harmonics and electronic beats, fading as they float upward into the night sky.

Red Dress

If you thought Kyp finished giving you the bad news on “Crying,” oh boy, have I got a song for you. Side B kicks off straight away with hard-strummed guitars and Kyp’s call of “Hey! Jackboot! Fuck your war!” And while, yes, this album was written, recorded, and released in the middle of our national shame that was the Iraq War, Kyp is using the term both literally and figuratively. His war is one that has been waged against people like him for hundreds of years.

Kyp’s anger at the never-ending racial disparities in America is matched by the high intensity music. The horn section is back, particularly in the chorus, where they blast directly into your ears with a ferocity on the level of unhinged rage. And if you thought that opening line was a bit too…on the nose, Kyp’s chorus is steeped in imagery. “Go ahead put your red dress on / Days of white robes have come and gone,” he sings, sarcastically pointing the finger at those Americans who believed that “racism doesn’t exist anymore.” Oh, how wrong the public would find out they were after 15 years of nearly constant state-sponsored murder, some of it even caught on camera. Then refencing a Rastafarian tenet, he cries “Come bear witness to the Whore of Babylon.”

The double finger-pointing here cannot be ignored. The most obvious is at America as the most consumerist of the West. But it’s also pointing at himself. “Come look at me, performing music for your money” he seems to be saying, self-critically, “in this decadent wasteland of a society.” The fierce, Caribbean percussion keeps going, long after Kyp, his guitar, and all the horns have fallen away, begging you to join in the hypocritical, hypercritical dance.

Love Dog

Acting as a cool down from the fiery “Red Dress,” and as a much more lovelorn companion to the band’s hit 2006 single “Wolf Like Me,” “Love Dog” sees Tunde as a metaphorical canine with unrequited, unreciprocated feelings for another. The late Gerard Smith begins the track with a mournful Rhodes piano, where he is quickly joined by Jaleel Bunton’s brilliant drum programming that includes gated kicks, distant handclaps, and an almost insect-like high hat. It’s truly a somber and beautiful composition.

The vocals showcase some of Tunde’s best poetry, delivered in his middle register that often cracks into a falsetto under the strain of such heartbreaking emotion: “I know why you cry out / Desperate and devout / Timid little teether / Your eyes set on the ether / Your moon in a belle Luna and / Howling hallelujah.”

For the first time on the album, “Love Dog” forgoes any sort of chorus in exchange for a continuous stream of Tunde’s lyrics delivered over rising and falling musical action: as his words and delivery get more emotional, the music begins to swell, picks up a subtle trumpet or two, a plaintive string section, muffled swirling sirens, and more and more programmed percussion, until the song is swollen with sound. “Patience is a virtue,” he sings, “until its silence burns you.”

Shout Me Out

“Shout Me Out” is something of a palette cleanser after the anger of “Red Dress” and the loneliness of “Love Dog.” Here, Tunde sings over a simple beat about feeling feelings just to feel them and wanting to be part of something bigger. Honestly, that was just a guess. Reading through the lyrics sheet in both physical copies I have has not led to me understanding Tunde’s simple, yet somehow bizarrely complex, lines here. In truth, much like Kyp’s (much more emotional) “Stork & Owl,” it’s more of a tone poem that exists to give weight to the musical experiment going on in the background.

As Tunde glides through each verse, you can hear the instrumentation begin to build, the layers of percussion on the beat backing him increasing. By the time he gets to the pre-chorus, Kyp’s guitar has come in, following along with Tunde’s delivery. The chorus then explodes into a free-style of rocking guitars, jock-jam beats, and distant “hey!”s shouted from some etherized world. Even if you don’t really get the lyrics, the music is there to guide you: pump it up and jam out.

DLZ

We enter the world of “DLZ” with a trip-hop inspired beat and dark background synths. Tunde brings back the rhyme scheme from opener “Halfway Home,” but this reprise is not the same angsty relationship drama as that place. No, this relationship is definitely over, and one that Tunde is none too happy about having ever really existed.

Starting that rhyme scheme off with a pentasyllabic word is a bold choice, but here we go: “Congra- / -tula- / -tions on / the mess / you made of things,” he begins. This song will be entirely deconstructive of the target, though who that target is is your choice: a romantic partner, a partner in crime, a notoriously absent-minded outgoing President (remember, it’s September 2008 ;) ), an entire bloc of mean-spirited “values” voters who put that President in place and have since systematically eroded democracy in America? Again, it’s up to you.

“You force your fire and then you falsify your deeds / Your methods dot the disconnect from all your creeds,” sounds like a line ripped from the headlines today. But this verse will be the last where Tunde is able to totally contain his disappointment and ire. The third verse switches the rhyme scheme into more of a breath-control-challenging string of lines that showcase his mastery of the form: “This is beginning to feel like the long-winded blues of the never / This is beginning to feel like it's curling up slowly and finding a throat to choke… / …Barely controlled locomotive consuming the picture and blowing the crows to smoke… / …Static explosion devoted to crushing the broken and shoving their souls to ghost / Eternalized, objectified, you set your sights so high / But this is beginning to feel like the bolt busted loose from the lever.” Highly animated strings and heavy drones come in during this soliloquy, building the tension to a breaking point.

That tension snaps in the fourth verse, where massive cymbal crashes and a full rock orchestra match Tunde’s fervor as he begins almost shouting: “Never mind, death professor / Your structure's fine, my dust is better / Your victim flies so high / All to catch a bird's eye view of who's next.” His rage is palpable as he puts…whoever it might be, in their well-deserved place, providing a verbal beatdown that has clearly been a long time coming. “Never you mind, death professor / Your shocks are fine, my struts are better / Your fiction flies so high / Y'all could use a doctor; who's sick, who's next?” he shout-sings in what might be my favorite quatrain in all of rock.

His wrath fully expelled, Tunde gently whistles his way out, just done with the target of his outrage. Whether the message stuck or not, he no longer cares. As he whistles, his inner monologue leaks out, certain that he will have to face this villain again: “This is beginning to feel like the dawn of the loser, forever.”

Lover’s Day

At the end of an incredibly dark second side, and at the close of Dear Science, we blissfully return to the, perhaps, naïve world of Kyp’s “Golden Age,” though without the pomp and beats. Here, Kyp sings a beautifully composed poem that is, to put it bluntly, about fucking, laid over Tchaikovsky-esque woodwinds and an ever-present set of sleigh bells.

All jokes aside, the placement of this song, with this…choice of subject matter, written in such a melodic, orchestral, and almost sugary way, is the perfect antidote to the creeping depression of side B, not just as an auditory refresher, but as a statement of its own: if you can find love, with whomever you may find it, that other dark shit is (quite literally in this case) in the past.

I won’t bother with a deconstruction of the lyrics, apart from saying that, even as obvious as Kyp’s thesis is, he writes his lines using some of the finest allusions, metaphors, and double entendres put to music so as to obfuscate the issue, while also simultaneously illustrating it. The song ends with a full chamber orchestra that was clearly stolen from Sufjan Stevens’ recording studio. The perfect end to a perfect day—I mean, album.

The release of Dear Science was met with some of the most universal acclaim of any album of the decade. Its massive critical success launched TV on the Radio from a well-regarded-yet-perpetually-underground club outfit to a true event band. From 2008 on, people didn’t just casually wonder what TVOTR was up to, they actively waited for their next…anything.

Without going through all my thoughts and opinions on their following releases (in short: Nine Types of Light is good but missed the mark; Seeds is literally one very annoying song away from a 10/10), I can safely say that I have longed for a return to this album style for them. That said, after the untimely passing of keyboardist Gerard Smith (who plays those Rhodes so, so beautifully in many songs here) in 2011, and their ever-lengthening hiatus since 2014’s Seeds, I now just long for a TV on the Radio return at all.

Dear Science was unprecedented, heat lightening, a fireworks display that sets off into the memories and imaginations of anyone who sees it. It is—and I do not say this lightly—an unparalleled masterpiece. A perfect album.