Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 29/09/08
Label: 4AD

Always a band that seemed wracked with a certain nervous guilt, TV On The Radio's arrival at their third album marks a slight but notable departure from that existential panic. The music of "Dear Science", despite the meditations on the human condition its title seeks to spark, slides smoother and more at ease than previous efforts, finally more becoming of the funk and soul that's always graced Tunde Adebimpe's vocal.

This progression can be traced through the best moments of the band's albums to date. "Staring At The Sun", its guitars seeming to build into a tight, nervous ball and (in the best possible way) not really go anywhere, epitomised everything that made 2004 debut "Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes" great, while "Wolf Like Me" and the remarkable, sky-scaling howls of "A Method" seemed to build just shy of a release that, though promised on 2006's "Return To Cookie Mountain", didn't quite come.

With "Dear Science" that expulsion of angst arrives and, aptly, most immediately with the band's own brand of existential funk - they may begin here with "Halfway Home" but that seems (again the nomenclature is apt) like a thread to link their last effort with their latest. Its building brood becomes, for the last minute or so, a joyous sprint that feels like young legs unleashed on the schoolyard after a morning pent-up in biology class, before "Crying" rocks steady into earshot, languid and easy. It's hard not to detect a newfound sense of Zen serenity when the track's opening gambit is an instruction to "Laugh in the face of death".

If this sounds like surrender, or hints at five people in awe of life's futility, it really shouldn't. TV On The Radio's strength is still that they never sound in awe of anything - there's been talk that "Family Tree", one of the record's few ballads, sounds pulled from Coldplay's newest. In truth it sounds like how Coldplay wish they could - where some bands aim for sonic maturity and end up sounding dead, TV On The Radio sound wise beyond their years, youthful stars whose mouthpiece contorts itself into funk shapes and whups without sounding like an out-of-depth chancer.

Much of the credit for this must be given to producer Dave Sitek, who does wonders doubling, sometimes tripling Adebimpe's voice into a looped chorus that manages to handle the wealth of themes his beat wordplay has always dealt in. And, if those themes can be boiled down, as they usually can, to life and death, "Dear Science" finds TV On The Radio in the prime of life.

    by Kev Kharas