A excerpt from Chron.com:
TV on the Radio wants you to groove in the face of doom
By ANDREW DANSBY Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 28, 2008, 6:25PM
Despite the band's penchant for dark electronic rock, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio doesn't come across as the brooding, contemplative type in conversation.
If the End of Days is coming, TV on the Radio wants you dancing. Dear Science, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based band's third album, is the soundtrack for that day, sort of an apocalyptic update of Prince's 1999.
With two albums and an EP, TV on the Radio had been a band I admired more than I enjoyed, particularly its densely produced and persistently angry Return to Cookie Mountain two years ago. It was an intriguing album — a more polished version of the band's novel approach to making dark electronic rock with touches of doo-wop and Afro-beat — but listening to it felt like homework.
Dear Science is about shaking a leg while shaking a fist. From the album's title down through its beats and lyrics, Dear Science is about contrasts and mixed meanings. Singer Tunde Adebimpe says the band deliberately picked a vague title, allowing it to be read either as a missive addressed to science or a statement of affinity for it.
He says the name sprang from a letter multi-instrumentalist David Andrew Sitek wrote (to science, naturally) expressing some anxiety about the impending use of the Large Hadron Collider, a multibillion-dollar physics project that some feared could create black holes or other possibly destructive phenomenon.
"We sat around thinking, 'Great, now what?' " Adebimpe says. "Is this really something we want to poke in the eye just to see what happens?
"The whole funding aspect is just awesome. I feel like there are genuine problems on this planet, but to my knowledge there's no current threat of a black hole advancing on Earth. So we don't need our own Godzilla version of the black hole to fight it off. Maybe instead we could develop a plant that could grow anywhere."
He pauses. "Dear Science was also the least offensive of the titles we came up with."
The album begins sprightly enough with Adebimpe playfully rattling off ba-ba-bas. The song rides a lighter groove than any Sitek created for the previous record. Adebimpe's voice moves from a warm whisper to a paranoid falsetto.
It closes with Lover's Day, written by guitarist Kyp Malone, about celebrating the end with a last roll in the hay.
For more of the Chron article, click here.
But then there's always the classics:
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