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You

TV On The Radio

“You,” TV on the Radio. Sad-sack is a strange look on Tunde Adebimpe. We’re used to him as the yowling art-rock prophet of Desperate Youth, or the lupine sex fiend of “Wolf Like Me.” Give him a good old-fashioned break-up to talk about and it can feel anticlimactic.

“You gave no reason for letting go
I thought you might like to know
You’re the only one I ever loved.”

This is how he kicks off “You,” and it’s a lyric that would not be out of place in a high school literary journal. And yet “You” was the first song on Nine Types of Light that I fell in love with. In the past I resisted embracing TVotR fully because much of their music, particularly on Return to Cookie Mountain, sounded to me like a bunch of too-serious guys spending all day in front of laptops working out equations. The facade began to crumble on their masterful Dear Science, though, and here on “You” the mask has fallen completely. That may be one reason Nine Types has been received less warmly than the band’s earlier work. But its directness should give it a broader appeal. There’s a real honesty at the song’s climax, when Adebimpe cries out in falsetto: “In our dreams we were making it right.” And when he sings “right,” his voice goes up a register, and he breaks the word in two. Scoff at the poor emo Brooklynite if you like. I’ll just turn it up and think of what Wilde said about preferring bad poets to their superiors: “He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.”  

(track via siceclub)

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