Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 03/07/06
Label: 4AD

Where the hell is Cookie Mountain? When TV On The Radio took an impassioned swipe at the Bush administration with their post-Katrina download single, "Dry Drunk Emperor", it seemed likely that the Brooklyn five-piece were headed for full-on politicisation. After all, their Sly Stone meets My Bloody Valentine shtick has always revolved around the ragged street poetry of singer Tunde Adebimpe, a man who often appears to be seconds away from proclaiming that the end of the world is nigh. So, an album charting the collapse of civilization was the next obvious step, yes?

Not quite. Rather than create an album of pointed fury, TVOTR have journeyed further into their own deeply impressionistic world. At times, they sound like they're reporting directly from a "Fisher King"-style frontline, ranting at the moon with the other vagrant visionaries under the iron bridges and cold edifices of downtown New York. At others, it feels as if they've wandered into a dense forest to practice a new brand of gospel - part tribal evocation, part sweet devotional, part rising discontent, part howling solidarity, a flurry of words and styles that keep rubbing against each other until they finally catch fire.

The result is an astonishing and utterly unique album that sounds totally out-of-time and yet still feels directly tied to the dark events that have shaped the first half of this decade. Opener, "I Was A Lover", for example, bleeds shapeshifting MBV-style noise bursts into a wash of gorgeous shoegazing fuzz and a beat that feels like it's been beamed from a science fiction vision of the 1940s (so, not Kasabian, then), while Adebimpe intones "I was a lover / before this war" in a falsetto that sounds almost morphine ecstatic.

"A Method", meanwhile, sounds like an incantation for light in stormy times, the clattering percussion and rising wave of harmonies conjuring up a humid and hypnotic atmosphere. "Province" features David Bowie on backing vocals, but he knows to stick to the background, letting these shamen get on with their mission, all hope and despair and purpose: "Like autumn leaves / We're in for change". The pace and mood builds until the album's highlight, "Wolf Like Me", which sounds gloriously unstoppable, the driving fuzz bass line and all encompassing vocal making you feel like there's hope in even the most terrifying situation. "My heart's aflame / My body's strained / But God I like it." And how.

This isn't an immediate record. You need time to sink into it, to become accustomed to its climate and momentum, to let your eyes and mind focus in its murky atmosphere. There's a sense that these songs will really shine live, spurred on by adrenalin and a mass of people, and that this is just a box for them to live in. But even so - take the time to squeeze inside, and you'll discover a startling, significant, endlessly inspiring album. Cookie Mountain, here we come.

    by Ian Watson