TV on the Radio - Dear Science (2008)

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Every so often something will genuinely surprise you.

In a world where we would risk re-enacting the big bang just so we could study the imprint it leaves, these sort of occurrences are unusually precious.

TV On the Radio's "Dear Science" was surprising, sonically iconaclastic and completely absorbing. Eclipsing everything the band has done before in a way that is difficult to describe without transcending language for sounds. Still we try.

James Brown funk guitar slinks amidst dubbed out horns, buzzing tones and sonically dispersed polyrhythms and raining descant synthesizers.

Grimey rap devours REM's It's The End of the World As We Know It over a slowly cycling synth bass - all menace and dread – before being engulfed in an entirely unexpected aural swirl of butterfly harmonies.

Non-linear grooves snarl and rail against the chains of straining guitar, succulent strings and resounding R&B horns, absorbing and absolving the forced dichotomy of the sacred and the sensual.

Everything perfectly balanced and lovingly placed

Musical signifiers pull and push in recombinant flux, dissolving into one another and then to something else all the while subsuming and then disgorging Tunde Adebimpe’s poised, exultantly apocalyptic, imagery. 

Adebimpe ebbs and gushes like Kerouac drowning his typewriter in the eddies and sloughs of life on the road, howling with Ginsberg at the wonder and waste.

The plodding sinking-in-mud rhythms of I Was A Lover filled out by George Martin's string section and claustrophobically close drum triggers. An alter-call by a jumped up preacher that you can’t help but follow as it draws you into the flowing hems of an aquarian choir ecstatically, disorientingly pushing forward into a bridge borrowed from Eno's production on U2's "Zooropa".

The now rapturous choir of calls back the string section from Stork & Owl for a poignant almost-ballad that threatens to bog down in its own melancholy until a classic new-order style outro raising majestically from the ashes and sackcloth – the eye of the albums melismatic hurricane.

Wait, pause, breathe, listen, not ending, becoming…

Absorbed – still no rest – triplet semi-quavers guitar pushes the down-tempo drums till they burst into double-time, pausing for breathe and allowing the pulse and wail of the guitars to overtake them and end in a sqaul of feedback and delay.

Pushing away now into disassociate electronica, epic and austere the perspective shifts to the feet of a monolith, struggling comprehension ultimately evaporating and then…

Insistent drums heralding a revenge plan crafted by Martin Hannet until control is wrested and everything goes awry, carried away by marching-band drums and whimsical horns.

Astounding.

RATING: 5 out of 5

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