This piece with TV on the Radio was in the NY Times recently and provides some really interesting insights on both the band, their outlook, and their new record, Dear Science, which is out today.
Keeping It Indie but Thinking Big Thoughts
By JON PARELES
Published: September 19, 2008
ONE day in July construction next door damaged the outside wall of Dave Sitek’s Headgear recording studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s the studio where the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars and Mr. Sitek’s own band, TV on the Radio, made albums that drew international attention to Brooklyn rock just a few years ago.
Those were the indie days, when TV on the Radio was passing out homemade discs at cafes, and band members squeezed bits of recording time between hours spent at day jobs. Over the past five years TV on the Radio has made its way steadily up the circuit, from independent to major label, from local clubs to international tours, while its music has grown ever more ambitious. Those ambitions are bohemian ones: packing a world of ideas into each song while ignoring both commercial imperatives and ingrown hipster cachet.
Tunde Adebimpe, the singer who started TV on the Radio with Mr. Sitek, unabashedly describes its music as art. When the band moved from the independent Touch & Go label to Interscope Records, one of the stipulations of the contract was that “there would be no involvement from the label on the creative end,” Mr. Adebimpe said. As the recording business loses its ability to create blockbusters, the band’s self-guided, self-sufficient approach looks like a practical survival strategy.
On Sept. 23 TV on the Radio follows its widely praised 2006 album, “Return to Cookie Mountain,” with a magnificent third album, “Dear Science,” (the comma is part of the title). The songs are vertiginous, full of cantilevered rhythms and synthetic sounds, yet openly catchy. Mr. Adebimpe and Kyp Malone sing about war and technology, environmental damage and racism while also invoking pleasure and hope.
The songs are pensive but ultimately joyful. The album starts with “Halfway Home,” an elegy tucked behind a peppy nonsense-syllable chorus, and it ends with “Lover’s Day,” a celebration of sex: “Yes of course there are miracles/Under your sighs and moans.”
Often a song starts with stark, kinetic drumbeats, only to thicken and evolve with layer upon layer of counterpoint. The band’s sound is “representative of the human experience,” Mr. Sitek said. “You have your first introduction to sound and hearing, and then you learn a language and then you learn to confuse yourself with that language, and then you’re left with this euphoric, slap-happy, I’ll call it aging twilight consciousness where you’re just befuddled at the human experience and all of the things you’ve accumulated with no direct guideposts or instruction manual.”
In an era of disposable downloads and ring tones “Dear Science,” is a coherent collection of songs made for repeated listening. “If you’re going to reach for it, reach all the way for it,” Mr. Sitek said. “Albums like ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Thriller’ and those kind of records, you had to reach far above the din of cynicism and modern living to get to that place, against all the odds. The industry used to support that kind of record making, and just because the marketplace of the industry doesn’t support it now doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still try for it.”
But the album was made on a local scale: in Mr. Sitek’s studio, with a horn section borrowed from the steady-gigging Brooklyn Afrobeat band Antibalas. “I think the album as a format is dying,” Mr. Sitek said. “To do an album of this magnitude, just in terms of the sheer number of things that had to be done and the amount of musicians involved and the amount of studio hours spent — if we didn’t have my studio, who knows? We could have been really in debt for the rest of our entire beings.”
TV on the Radio has held on to the experimental spirit of what was briefly, before landlords and tourists noticed, a neighborhood of low rents and high creative density. “You could go out on a Saturday night and go to eight different places and see eight different bands, and they would all be interesting — really interesting,” Mr. Adebimpe said. There was a feeling, he said, that “I have to keep making stuff that I like so I can keep hanging out with my friends who make stuff that I like.”
Back in 1997 Mr. Adebimpe — at the time a filmmaker doing stop-motion animation, with a day job at Film Forum — and Mr. Sitek found themselves as roommates in a Williamsburg loft, which led to a musical partnership. “It just became apparent very quickly that we were going to be friends,” Mr. Adebimpe recalled in an interview at the Verb Cafe in Williamsburg, “because his room was full of all this musical equipment with nothing but a mattress, and my room was full of paints and video equipment and nothing but a mattress.”
Soon they took on collaborators: Mr. Malone on guitar and vocals, Jaleel Bunton on drums and Gerard Smith on bass. “We bullied everyone else into the band because we didn’t want to go through it alone,” said Mr. Sitek, whose main instrument is guitar. All the band members are in their early 30s.
The four-inch dent in the studio wall is the latest iteration of what’s already an old story: the continuing gentrification of Williamsburg. The members of TV on the Radio all still live in the neighborhood, watching bodegas being replaced by fancy restaurants and boutiques. In one song on the new album, “Dancing Choose,” Mr. Adebimpe sings at near-rap speed:
Angry young mannequin
American apparently
Still to the rhythm
Better get to the back of me
Can’t stand the vision.
A high-rise apartment building is going up next door to Mr. Sitek’s studio — actually two studios, since Stay Gold, where TV on the Radio made “Dear Science,” is in the rooms next to Headgear. “They build one skyscraper, and skyscrapers get lonely,” Mr. Sitek said in his three-pack-a-day rasp, lighting up in the alley alongside his favorite Williamsburg club, Zebulon. “So then they call their friends and more skyscrapers come, and they throw a party. And the next thing you know there’s a skyscraper blogging about the skyscraper scene in Williamsburg.”
Early on, TV on the Radio benefited from the talent-spotting and reputation-building of the indie-rock blogosphere. But eventually the band felt typecast. “I’m done with cool,” Mr. Malone said. “I’ve been done with cool for years.”
Mr. Sitek said: “We always wanted to reach a lot of people. We never wanted to be obscure. I think it was just hard for us to get a handle on how to make the kind of music we make and how to describe it. And it started to be misunderstood that we were trying to do some kind of weird art-house-rock obscure thing. But that’s not it at all.
“In our minds these songs are that simple. We needed to get a lot of stuff out of our system, but it wasn’t in opposition to something. We weren’t like: We want to make this giant complicated thing. It’s just we had five different people with completely different perspectives, trying to make all of our ideas fit into one thing.”
“Dear Science,” is both an extension and a turnabout of TV on the Radio’s past work. Nervous energy and apocalyptic scenarios filled the band’s 2003 EP, “Young Liars” (Touch & Go), and its first two albums, “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” (Touch & Go) in 2004 and “Return to Cookie Mountain” (Interscope) in 2006. The songs on those albums contemplated the aftermath of Sept. 11, the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. The lyrics were surreal and allusive, arriving in dense art-rock productions that melded looped drumbeats, doo-wop vocal harmonies, atmospheric noise, guitar dissonance and improbable pop hooks.
“I like pop music,” Mr. Malone said in a telephone interview. “I also like the sound of a dying refrigerator. I can listen to that for an hour and a half if I’m in the mood.”
There’s still a deep streak of dread on the new album. Its title, “Dear Science,” includes the comma because it was the salutation of a letter Mr. Sitek posted on the studio wall while the band was working on the album. Mr. Adebimpe said it was written “in a kind of kid’s handwriting on yellow notebook paper.” The letter was addressed to Science itself, demanding that it “fix all the things you’re talking about” or shut up.
But through much of the album there’s a counterpoint of hope. “It’s hard to tour the apocalypse,” Mr. Adebimpe said. “For me the point of songs, the point of getting that stuff out, is getting it out and trying to put it in a place so it’s not eating you alive.”
For this album, Mr. Sitek said, “I didn’t want anything to be misunderstood, and I didn’t want anything to be cloudy in an unintended way.” He continued, “We were unpeeling these layers between us and what we thought was absolutely stunning and beautiful, and not so depressing this time.”
Though the album has angry moments, much of the music tilts toward major chords and willfully upbeat choruses. “The age of miracles, the age of sound,” the song “Golden Age” insists over a beat that echoes the heyday of Michael Jackson, “Well there’s a Golden Age comin’ round.”
Mr. Malone, the song’s main writer, said: “I’m starting to realize that I don’t want to just write jeremiads, even though the times kind of call for them. With ‘Golden Age’ I was trying consciously to create a utopian world inside a pop song. I don’t think that three minutes of music on a commercial record is going to bring paradise, but I feel like there is power in music and power in our words and power in what we put out into the world."
After his interview Mr. Adebimpe walked with a visitor past Stay Gold studios. On the sidewalk was Brian Chase, the drummer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who are finishing an album there with Mr. Sitek producing. Could Mr. Adebimpe drop by later and overdub some whistling on a song? Sure he could. For a moment Williamsburg seemed like the bohemian neighborhood it had been — at least for a little longer.
Correction: September 21, 2008
An article on Sept. 7 about the band TV on the Radio misidentified the owners of Headgear recording studio in Brooklyn. The owners are Alex Lipsen, Dan Long and S. F. Norton; the studio is not owned by Dave Sitek, a member of TV on the Radio. (Mr. Sitek owns Stay Gold, a studio in the same building.) The article also misidentified a recording studio used by the band Liars. It has recorded with Mr. Sitek at Hickory Lane studios, not at Headgear. And the article misstated the cause of damage to the building that houses Headgear. The external wall was damaged after concrete was poured against it; it was not damaged by a bulldozer.
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