TV On The Radio - Dear Science

4AD

This is the album that TV On The Radio will be remembered for; their tilt at immortality. Having garnered huge critical kudos with the heavily politicised and genre-demolishing explosion of 2006’s Return To Cookie Mountain, the Brooklynites could easily have found themselves hamstrung by expectation. Two years since that last record and some seven years since emerging from the rubble of post 9/11 New York, the quintet is still driven to question and lament the state of this world. Here, though, the political is tempered with personal contemplation and never before have they written songs that grab your attention as forcefully as those on Dear Science.

From the off and the fuzzy, punk rock freak-out of ‘Halfway Home’ this record snags your attention like the barbed wire around Guantanamo. Fans of the band’s more avant-garde early material might recoil in disgust at the word ‘accessible’ but this really is their most immediately striking collection of tunes. Overwhelming, unstoppable, these songs come steamrollering at us like the boulder in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The sheer diversity is dizzying – Dear Science is an emotional and stylistic chameleon of a record, equally at home offering us the funk frenzy of ‘Crying’, the cracked soul balladry of ‘Family Tree’ or the blitzkrieg orchestral pop of ‘Love Dog’. Each song is a rich, glittering pearl. Strung together, they create something inestimably precious. Francis Jones

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DOWNLOAD: ‘DANCING CHOOSE’, ‘STORK & OWL’, ‘FAMILY TREE’.
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Issue #52 - Very Bro-some

Featuring Panama Kings, ASIWYFA, an investigation into DIY touring, details of what over 25 of the finest NI bands are up to in 2009 and much more.