TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain (2006)

Every once in awhile MTV slips up and lets a band on the air that isn’t just regurgitating the same mundane music that pigeonholes itself to a genre whose listeners like to cut themselves and talk about how much they hate their parents. Seriously though, TV On The Radio exudes a refreshing change of pace in a music industry where commercialism and sensationalism often take the place of creativity and individuality.

The best way to describe this band is by putting The Roots, Beck, and Radiohead into a shaker and making a delicious TVOTR cocktail. It’s difficult to find anything that compares sonically. Layer upon layer of sound create a rich harmonic atmosphere that somehow manages to remain lucid and not congested with noise. The mood created has almost as much to do with what they don’t play, the spaces between the notes, and our erroneous anticipation of where the song is headed based on where it’s been.

The latest album Return to Cookie Mountain clearly embodies a struggle between light and dark. Tunde Adepimbe’s falsetto vocals in the backdrop of charging tempos on tracks like “Wolf Like Me” and “Playhouses” somehow gel into a cohesive disposition that always seems to be teetering on the verge of disaster. That however is what makes this album so great. It’s the dissimilarities, the incongruities in the wake of chaos, that make the conventional seem novel and this by far the best indie rock album this year.