TV on the Radio

Here's a band that I found in London. Since then, I've been continuously losing and re-discovering them. Somehow, I always love their music, but it never catches me enough for my short term memory to make the (apparently) massive leap to long term. (The funny thing is that I've looked at the parts of my brain that are supposed to be involved in that, and they look completely normal... shows how useful my 'profession' is...) Anyway, here's an extremely creative band. The lead singer has a very distinctive voice, and he's usually accompanied by a very high falsetto and another low harmony. The samples used for the main texture range from ambient noise to abrupt horn clips (see track #1 from Return to Cookie Mountain). The beat has the kind of heavy feel of Daedelus or even Radiohead. The drums' staccato high hats and driving snare hits make tracks like #4 from ...Cookie Mtn straddle techno, electronica, typical indie rock, and whatever you want to call the genre that Trent Reznor invented in his early works. I currently don't have any of their older albums, but I'll get them. I remember hearing tracks from "Young Liars" in London while smoking Dan's hookah and being very impressed. Track $5 from Cookie Mtn is almost catchy. It makes me want to see a TVOTR - Scissor Sisters collaboration. Each song's style reminds me of something, but I'm bad at matching new memories to old ones, so I'm not even going to try. The point is, you need to give this industrial-indie-rock-pop a shot. The newest "Return to Cookie Mountain" has a nice variety of sounds. Right now, the song that stands out the most to me is Track 1, but that always happens at the beginning. Love the exceptional percussion sounds in all of the tracks and the unconventionality of all of it. Keep your mind open to static patterns and purposefully out-of-tune yelling and appreciate the depth of creativity and the tight beats. Oh, and if you haven't listened to NIN "Pretty Hate Machine," "The Downward Spiral," and "Further Down the Spiral" (American release), hurry up. Reznor really opened up the doors so that music like this could exist, and these are three of my all time favorites, even though sometimes they do make me sleep uneasily.

TVOTR tour date notables:

4/13/2007
Concert
Atlanta, GA Variety Playhouse
1099 Euclid Ave. 30307

4/14/2007
Concert
Nashville, TN Mercy Lounge
37201