Some Drop Science, I'm Dropping English
I remember reading an interview with Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan, where he confessed that his first reaction to hearing Brian Wilson's magnum opus was, actually, "this is Pet Sounds?" The Beach Boys' classic 1966 orchestral-pop album is so enshrouded in myth-making and list-making that it's hard to hear it, for the first time, and not express disappointment. Listening to an LP already loaded with the idea that you're about to have your mind blown creates a disproportionate sense of anticipation. It's the musical equivalent of tensing up. Playing the latest longplayer for Brooklynite rock'n'roll monster TV on the Radio provoked in me a similar reaction: this is Dear Science?
The third TVOTR LP has been, long before it was ever even released, pronounced as one of the greatest albums ever made. The good word doing the rounds well in advance was that Dear Science was not only the epic New Yorkers' best set yet, nor even just one of 2008's picks, but a veritable instant classic, one of the greatest ever recorded works. With the blogosphere's industry-of-hype ratcheting expectations exponentially, the bar was raised to impossible, vertiginous heights. Meaning: Dear Science either had to be brain-breakingly unbelievable, or it was going to be a mild disappointment.
it shouldn't be this way, of course. Saying an album is rather good should never be akin to, somehow, saying it's bad. Dear Science is, indeed, rather good, but when the powers-that-be have crowned it the five-star classic, is a four-star review viewed as tantamount to treason?
The Joy of Sex
The best thing about TV on the Radio's latest —which is, indeed, lightyears better than the embarrassing Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, and probably shades the apocalyptic Return to Cookie Mountain— is that, like the reproductive act, its climax comes at the end. It's possible Dear Science was engineered to reflect the rhythms of sex, given the way its orgasmic closing cut, "Lover's Day," sends the album off amidst six minutes of ever-escalating ecstasy; the song spiraling onwards, upwards, to a frenetic, fiery, explosive conclusion.
Fittingly enough, the song actually is Kyp Malone's joyful tribute to procreation: "a gender-neutral, sex-positive love song" that features the bearded one singing such hot-and-heavy things as "swear to God it'll get so hot it'll melt our faces off" and "ball so hard we'll smash the walls" and "I'm gonna make you cum."
Yet, in duet with The Boggs' Ellie Everdell, their male/female voices swimming and dancing like mingling limbs, Malone also realizes "of course there are miracles/under your sighs and moans," making this a song about f**king that's in reverence to the spiritual —or, indeed, the scientific— resonance that underwrites the "ecstatic disaster" of gettin' it on.
I Need You Hindsight
"Lover's Day" also serves as culmination of Dear Science's dearest ambition: the use of the studio as instrument. TVOTR's man-behind-the-curtain, Dave Sitek, fashions symphonies of excess, constructing songs as massive monuments, built in reverent tribute to polyphonic production and artful multitracking.
Abusing the ability of recorded-sounds to trick the human ear's perception of the world around it, Sitek creates impossible spaces; taking innumerable source sounds and pressing them, intimately, to the listener's ears. On the album's finalé, it's a swarm of woodwinds, a marshaled drum corps, and cascading walls of faux-choral vocals, shoegaze guitars, and bristling brass.
That grand-scale mix of grandeur and detail, that sense of big-production-number ambition, could, indeed, lend Dear Science comparisons to Pet Sounds. But, stylistically and aesthetically, it's far more like, say, INXS's Kick: a confident, sharply-produced, catchy-as-hell set mixing new-wave, soul, sex, and commercial rock with an irrepressible decadence. Kick garnered all manner of critical acclaim and awards-show statuettes upon its 1987 release, but, 20 years on, to evoke its name is akin to slander.
20 years from now, who knows whether Dear Science will still be remembered as 2008's best. Critical consensus can seem so concrete at certain times, but perceptions and opinions are fluid. Maybe, in 20 years time, everyone will have come to agree with what Dave Sitek and I both believe: the most important rockband at the moment isn't TV on the Radio, but their strangely-unloved pals Celebration.
Record Label: 4AD/Interscope
Release Date: 23 September 2008
