In 2002, New York rock was having a comeback, an odd idea for a genre and a city that in the twentieth century already had dibs on many of pop culture’s high points. But radio pop and hip-hop were in ascendance, and for the umpteenth time traditional guitar rock appeared to be down for the count. In quick succession, however, the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs made strong cases for a New York take on the conventional guitar-bass-and-drums setup (although the Yeah Yeah Yeahs didn’t have, or need, a bass player). The Strokes caused those instruments to crackle again, while the Yeah Yeah Yeahs let the guitar and the voice sound elemental and wild, without having to resort to pastiche or revival. The two bands so saturated the indie scene that scouts for record labels seemed to take up permanent residence in Brooklyn. In the United Kingdom, the Strokes’ version of a New York sound made such an impression that it was ten years before a band from there stopped feeling in some way indebted to the group’s clipped, deadpan approach.
But TV on the Radio, some of whose members lived with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in Brooklyn, was conspicuous by its distance from that sound. The band made its first recordings in 2002—a CD-R of home demos, called “OK Calculator,” a nod to Radiohead’s “OK Computer.” The members scattered copies throughout Brooklyn and were soon signed to the influential Chicago label Touch and Go. The standout song on the début EP, “Young Liars,” is “Staring at the Sun.” It begins with Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone singing falsetto “ooh”s before being joined by a sound that is either a bass guitar or a keyboard facsimile of one. In contrast with the unprocessed, raw guitars that characterized the New York rock bands, TV on the Radio posed a question: Is a real-time event superior to its digital imitation? Perhaps the two things are not as closely linked as we might think—over time, the digital equivalent of a bass guitar takes on its own qualities, removed from its alleged model.
The hi-hat that eventually enters is almost certainly too regular to be a human drummer; “Staring at the Sun” serves as a hybrid of rooted, organic pleasures and unidentifiable digital beauty. Though TV on the Radio doesn’t sound much like Radiohead, the bands share an urge to make a live band bend music into shapes afforded by the flexibility of computer programming without giving up the immediacy and the human force of playing in real time. In 2003, when the EP came out, it wasn’t clear if listeners were supposed to trust the people or the computers. Perhaps it still isn’t.
Performing in November at the Apollo Theatre, on the day that “Seeds,” the band’s new album, was released, Adebimpe told the audience, “I don’t trust the Internet.” The band was playing “Repetition,” from its previous album, “Nine Types of Light” (2011), and the song had come to a passage, a couple of minutes in, where it breaks down. Adebimpe began to recite a monologue about making a connection. After stating his doubts about the reliability of the Web as a way of communicating, he suggested that everyone look one another in the eye and say “light.” On the album, he repeats the words “my repetition / my repetition is this,” but that night the looping word became “light.” As the word was chanted throughout the theatre, the band kicked back in.
TV on the Radio isn’t all about crowd-pleasing, but Adebimpe’s improvised lyric was typical of the band’s skill at making potentially pretentious sounds and ideas seem casual. The members have the curiosity of Radiohead, but they relate it in a more modest and direct way; they are unworried about playing straight-ahead rock when it seems suitable. There are all kinds of unexpected sounds sprinkled through their albums, but there is no puffed-up rejection of being a live rock band. TV on the Radio is composed of practical dreamers, open to any ideas floating through new music but unconcerned with radically changing their sound every few minutes. Though they have experienced tragedy—their bassist, Gerard Smith, died of lung cancer, in 2011—they have sustained an enjoyably firm sense of self, and have never sounded desperate or trendy. You could easily line up “Seeds” against the band’s first full-length album, “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes,” and the ten years separating the two would dissolve.
In retrospect, perhaps the most provocative song on “Young Liars” is a lush, a-cappella version of “Mr. Grieves,” a slightly abstract song from the Pixies’ album “Doolittle” (1989). With a sly inversion, TV on the Radio takes on one of guitar rock’s canonized bands. Almost straight doo-wop, the revised version transforms Black Francis’s disconnected imagery and uses the sweetness of the band’s voices to tease out the menace of lyrics like “You can cry, you can mope, but can you swing from a good rope?” TV on the Radio turns off-the-cuff surrealism into something charged—without even touching a guitar.
Adebimpe has a quietly wide vocal range; he’s the kind of singer who doesn’t register as an athletic, showy presence, but when he wants to go for big moments he can pull them off. “Seeds” begins with “Quartz,” a song that, intentionally or not, echoes “Staring at the Sun.” Malone and Adebimpe set up a wordless choral backdrop paired with clapping sounds, a bell, and a steady sixteenth-note bass line that is not clearly a bass player or a machine. In the opening, Adebimpe sings out, playing romance straight, with no twists, just long notes: “How much do I love you? How hard must we try to set into motion a love divine?” The song then blooms, with drums punching solidly in half time, while a thrush of bells hovers around Adebimpe’s vocal. It seems to catalogue the doubts of a relationship that doesn’t sound new and is having trouble moving forward.
It makes sense that TV on the Radio has created a large organic audience, big enough to sell out the Apollo but not so big that the band has ever had anything like a Top Ten hit. The group’s career is one that many bands now would be wise to mimic—staying true to an idiosyncratic voice, not taking off much time from work, and simply carrying on. A different band might take a song like “Lazerray”—a charging, largely unadorned melodic rock song—and license it for commercials, looking for the kind of radio hit that turns a band from big into huge. They could likely write ten “Lazerray”s and move into a bigger, more exclusive field of successful bands. If anything makes TV on the Radio a New York band, it’s the members’ refusal to do this, to highlight their uncanny sense of texture and melody and to be stubbornly unpredictable. ♦
