TV On The Radio | Album Review

Story by Jacob Zlomke 

| Published Apr 19, 2011

Brooklyn-based TV on the Radio has spent the last decade or so taking its listeners on vastly different explorations of musical soundscapes, and with April’s “Nine Types of Light” the band is once again satisfyingly hard to generalize. It sort of started in 2001 when TVotR was just another Brooklyn art-rock band, but really began rolling in 2003 with the band’s “Young Liars” EP.

They kept going with the epic “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes” in 2004 and have continued with “Return to Cookie Mountain” in 2006 and 2008’s “Dear Science”--each one different from the previous with lead-singer Tunde Adebimpe’s soulfully soaring and haunting vocal delivery the only constant.

Given their history, it’s not unexpected that TVotR rewrote itself again for “Nine Types of Light.” What the listener gets is a record that’s exactly what it is: an album by a band that’s trudged through a hard and experimental decade and come out with four pretty stellar albums to show for it. TVotR and “Nine Types of Light” are certainly music of the times. It’s not a band full of young Brooklyn post-punks anymore, but rather a band full of almost-aged adults looking back on a tumultuous decade.

Adebimpe’s percussive delivery has its foot in at least three camps--pop, funk, and folk--making for a hard balancing act. The bass and keyboard grooves border on funky, and the whole album comes off as suave. TVotR has certainly aged well.