Touch and Go
When TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain was released in 2006 critics fell all over each other to heap praise upon it. It turned into a sort of competitive hyperbole — if one publication felt it was the best album of the year the next felt it was the best of the past five years. Then the decade.
Strange then that only a couple of years later the band’s followup has been so roundly ignored (including by Fast Forward ). Dear Science is a sexier more accessible album. Certainly not as challenging as Cookie Mountain but it has its merits. “Crying” sounds like the best song that Al Green never recorded; “Stork & Owl” is great though perhaps a little too Bowie-esque; “Family Tree” shows a promising willingness to try a different approach to the band’s songwriting. The only real disaster on the album is “Red Dress” a funk jam that the band doesn’t wear well.
What Dear Science lacks that Cookie Mountain had in spades is atmosphere. There’s nowhere in this album to get lost; nowhere that makes you stop in your tracks and just listen. Still the album deserved better than to drift by without mention.
