TV On The Radio
Return to Cookie Mountain
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NATN Recommended
TV On The Radio
Return to Cookie Mountain
Interscope, 2006
RiYL: Pere Ubu, Peter Gabriel, Radiohead |
With this hypnotic couplet at the center of Return to Cookie Mountain's first song, a profound loss is laid bare, and blame is ascribed explicitly to an act and ongoing fact of worldwide notoriety. We all know what war this is.
That the war has been paid for with some part of this narrator's humanity is neither journalistic nor editorial, and for that, I have fallen in love with it. Our daily efforts to live a real life, to attempt human contact and risk sensuality, are all complicated by living in this global political theater, and that's not something that can be addressed by polemics. We already know what we're dealing with; we're aware of the facts. But five years into an era, and three years into a war, artists can help us figure out how we feel: “I'm locked in my bedroom/ so send back the clowns.”
Musically, the swayback symphonic horns of “I was a Lover” are repeatedly under siege from jarring synthetic tasers, like a nice midnight walk to clear one's head intercepted by radar. Welcome to New York in wartime.
Return from Cookie Mountain's songs are built from the ground up, fuzzed-out accelerating engines carrying singers, bus loads of multi-tracked voices shouting with full throats lyrics such as, “they let the devil in/ he brought his pirate friends/ they brought a hunger for blood/ and flesh and bone and skin” on “Let the Devil In”.
The multiple voices on nearly every song provide community uplift where one voice may have sounded lonely. This freak Greek chorus (and I will sing with all my heart at the first show of theirs that I can find a ticket for) reminds me of "Hair," or of 1960s modern dance's inquisition of off-broadway dramatic literalism. Synesthetic red herrings, to be sure: Return to Cookie Mountain's songs are utterly lacking in the didactic slogans of the '60s. Yet these songs do indeed march the streets. Return to Cookie Mountain shares with that time an optimistic collective pugnacity, a real sense of fight.
“A Method” is a playful exercise in harmony punctuated by the obtuse diss “There is hardly a method you know”. The horniness of parties in other people's kitchens waft through “Playhouses”: “Cigarettes/ and sugar shit/ and alcohol breath/ I can taste the ocean on your tongue.” “Tonight” is a song-as-timepiece, with backwards bells and keyboard stabs winding back, on top of a rhythm slow enough for lead singer Tunde Adebimpe's observations to be processed, articulated, and held.
Adebimpe's voice is versatile, and his phrasing of the lyrics are in themselves so descriptive that I have been roped into exhorting along with these songs with barely any knowledge of what the hell he's saying. Lyrically, the hell and heaven of things are at the heart of these songs, as is the heart itself, whether beating, bloody, or clutched in hand, as songs alternately look up to heaven for mother's care, and at ground level for a land overrun by demons and vices.
Musically, these are not conventional rock ensemble arrangements; rather, drawing sounds brasher than Massive Attack and rawer than Radiohead, they are nonetheless organic and democratic in ways reminiscent of both groups: Loveless' layers cut by a full two-thirds. The music is muscular and spiky, making good use of voluminous white noise as a backdrop for multiple vocal melodies and improvisations. It's like nothing else out today, but not conspicuously so.
I heard that David Bowie sings backup here, but I have no idea which songs he's on. Trust me: it's not important what he's doing here. For all practical purposes he's subsumed in the morass, another voice of many. And as represented by each voice, no matter how many of them are multi-tracked versions of one man's quite personal feelings, we are all fortunate to be on this. This is the album of the year. And we are still lovers, no matter what our current lament is.
WILL CRAVEN |