TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear Preview

TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear
Metro, Chicago
Monday, October 9, 2006

Three years ago, TV On The Radio appeared out of nowhere as a rock critic’s wet dream: multi-ethnic, from hopping Williamsburg, graphic artists by trade, and plying a sound no one could put a finger on but nearly everyone liked. That they were given the stamp of approval by Touch And Go Records was like telling a lottery winner they had a picture of Andrew Jackson stuck on their shoe.

Their first EP, Young Liars, and album, Desperate Youth Blood Thirsty Babes, mixed PiL-imbued post punk guitar noise, a Peter Gabriel-esque touch of world beat, doo-wop harmonies, Eno-esque synths, and the searing, gospel delivery of singer Tunde Adembimpe with all the self-awareness of “Isn’t this what you’re supposed to do?” For Adembimpe, Dave Sitek, and Kyp Malone manipulating tapes is like flip-flopping G and C chords for singer-songwriters, yet on top of it all is the raging Adebimpe, conflicted in his artistry and being forced to carry a “black” aura in his lyrics. As if to prove their studio work wasn’t some contrived laboratory experiment, the band quickly responded in 2005 with another EP, New Health Rock, and an Internet-only single confronting the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, “Dry Drunk Emperor.”

Yet a cloud of skepticism hung over the fall release of Return To Cookie Mountain, pretty much entirely because TVOTR left Touch And Go for major label Interscope. Not that they couldn’t do wonders with a larger recording budget — and a bigger tour stipend to help the offset the addition of two more members. But a sound like theirs, all but indescribable to the most articulate of scribes, is supposed to be mass marketed?

Let’s just say TVOTR didn’t give the publicity department at Interscope much of a head start, even if David Bowie makes an appearance. *Cookie Mountain isn’t quite as dark as Desperate Youth, but it’s equally dense and has all five members contributing. Under a prison-break-siren sample, Adebimpe fires in a circle on opener “I Was A Lover,” “And we liked to party/And we kept it live/And we had a three-volume tome of contemporary slang/to keep a handle on all this jive.” Accessibility reaches its grubby little fingers on the semi-delicate “Province,” though once the wind of the first chorus dies down, it fights its way back through the shuttered windows on a mission.

It’s hard to ignore the inherent politicism of Cookie Mountain, but it’s hard to figure out any specific message — if there is one. Most of the album’s first act is represented by struggle (“Cradled in a cry/Your light will shine,” “Running on empty, bourbon, and god,” “Hold your heart courageously/As we walk into this dark place”) that suddenly bursts into chaos (“We shit our bed of roses,” “Gotta bust that box gotta gut that fish/My mind’s aflame”), the latter lines coming from the straightforward punk rock of “Wolf Like Me.” What the album sequencing actually means is debatable (it was reshuffled after an Internet leak), though the clouds sorta break and the band find solace in at least having an idea what the end is (even if it means meeting locked gates, unscrupulous women, giving up, or forgetting the past).

Openers Grizzly Bear make a game of fitting them into categories as well, finding so many overlapping circles on Yellow House (Warp) they might as well be redesigning the Olympic logo. Also debuting a full band (originally just Edward Droste), Grizzly Bear wrap hazy, lilting melodies in comedown psychedelia that collides the footpaths of Akron/Family, David Grubbs, Brian Wilson, and The Arcade Fire. Yellow House, not the red house over yonder, overcomes its in-the-studio placenta by giving its soaring, ghostly vocals a Beach Boys-worthy harmony (“Knife”) other times importing breezy, English folk guitar patterns (“Little Brother”) that grow increasingly more comfortable in the album’s grasp.

— Steve Forstneger

Click here to download Grizzly Bear’s “Lullaby.”

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly