Shock factor was never the only dynamic at play, but it was key. When Brooklyn’s curious art-misfits TV On the Radio arrived in 2004 with their debut, ‘Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes’, there was arguably nobody else on the face of this planet making music as sizzlingly acute, as fiercely shaken. Warped barbershop? Minimal percussive millennial soul? Jazz shoegaze wall-of-sound odd-hop? Sure! It was a deeply stimulating ride along a convoluted route from A-Z through the city’s underbelly, hitching figurative lifts on rusty tailpipes, taxi roofs, jumping barriers on the subway and base-jumping the beat. Its unpredictability was important. So, in spite of some bold inter-album activity in the form of ‘New Health Rock’ and ‘Dry Drunk Emperor’, the fear is that without the element of surprise they just turn out to be men in scary paper masks, easily rationalised. And there’s nothing like genuine innovation to raise your sense of expectation either. So, enter ‘Return To Cookie Mountain’.
And enter it does. Within the space of the first few tracks it’s clear that this is neither a retread nor a reinvention, but something like a high grade refurbishment. A definite next step. It’s like components of all their means of transport from the debut cobbled together by an oily entrepreneur into one mean and slightly rattley customised hub of creativity, with big wheels. Meaning that subsequently, by definition, it is a little less unpredictable. Things are tacked into place this time, but that is trumped overall by the surging consistency and sense of empowered intent it brings. Every track is a different mangled spoke from the same wheel. And that makes for a, yes, almost surprisingly complimentary body of work.
If it needs a central pivot, and reluctantly it does, then that is found in their wonderful vocals, a passionate rabble of drunkenness, weaved from complimentary opposites. Drunk on adrenaline, intensity, politics, life, the brotherly motivation they provide each other and the depths of their souls (which you can take as a genre tag too). It is the key to their spirit and this unfurls particularly well during ‘Dirty Whirl’, incrementally raising the vocal fervour against an insistent backdrop of shuffling hi-hats, sleazy progressions and a repetitive rhythm guitar. The rhythm is hypnotic throughout, spilling from track to track. ‘Playhouses’ and ‘Wolf Like Me’ are particularly corresponding pair, the former a mesh of textured white noise, incredible quick-snap jazz drums, creeping synth and hymnal emoting, the latter possibly the best thing they’ve put to tape yet – manic glam drumming, writhing art guitar, stomach-churning bottom-end, a respite middle-eight and a climax to tear the roof off your scalp.
To prepare – and you feel this has been particularly prepared – another solid album of the year contender is surprising behaviour. Those masks then – *relax* – still ripping the heebeegeebees out of you.