Not priced out yetNot too sure what I think about this. After three straight days of listening to Dear Science (not sure if the comma is in the title, per Jon Pareles, or out), the newest record from TV on the Radio, I still can't get my head all the way around it. Granted, sometimes you can't force yourself to digest art, there will be an epiphany down the road, etc. Yet with TVOTR's previous outings, I was always able to get a bead after a couple of listens - 2003's Young Liars EP and 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain each sounded rich, complicated, crespuscular right off of the bat, making plain the tensions and anxieties undergirding the music and lyrics. Each were strongly thematic works, aesthetically and philosophically, centered on a marriage of indie rock, hip-hop, Motown, and noise in the first instance and an extreme sense of dislocation in the latter. Even 2004's inferior Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes - one wonders if the band would have profited by confounding expectations and allowing the superlative Young Liars stand alone as their debut - is insistently unitary in its purpose and execution.
In Pareles' interview with TVOTR's principals, he insists on Dear Science's cohesiveness. Indeed it is his thesis vis-a-vis the album: "In an era of disposable downloads and ring tones 'Dear Science,' is a coherent collection of songs made for repeated listening." This remark implicitly places Dear Science in a pop continuum, as opposed to the confines of the indie rock scene wherein TVOTR have achieved their most enduring success, and where the album format still retains significant currency. Certainly, this is a context Dave Sitek, the band's lead guitarist and sound manipulator, embraces:
“If you’re going to reach for it, reach all the way for it,” Mr. Sitek said. “Albums like ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Thriller’ and those kind of records, you had to reach far above the din of cynicism and modern living to get to that place, against all the odds. The industry used to support that kind of record making, and just because the marketplace of the industry doesn’t support it now doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still try for it.”Thriller and Purple Rain are shorthand for pop ambition; well, not just pop ambition but the desire to reach an audience so broad as to be all encompassing. The kind of reach event records like Thriller and Purple Rain had before the concept of an event record evaporated in the late '90s, early '00s (I direct your attention to No Strings Attached and The Marshal Mathers LP); the kind of reach that is now the exclusive, if diminishing, province of event films like The Dark Knight. (Unless you count Google as art. Takers?)
Granted, I don't think that Sitek or his bandmates seriously countenance the possibility of Dear Science reintroducing the pop record as unifying cultural event - frankly, they're on the wrong side of the musical polyglot divide, the omnivorous Timbaland presently occupying that particular high ground. But Dear Science is their pop move, make no mistake about it. The rough edges are there, but sanded down - abrasive in the mold of former label and tourmates Nine Inch Nails. The addition of horns courtesy of Brooklyn's Antibalas obliterates the band's assiduously cultivated air of sonic claustrophobia. And one could go positively batshit trying to count the myriad clever appropriations of Top 40 technique. The cumulative effect is that even at its least direct, you never lose sight of the fact that Dear Science is foremost a big pop record - a statement meant to be received in the same manner as Thriller, or Purple Rain, or, to cite a more proximate example, Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds.
Thus, the question might be: does Dear Science succeed on this, its chosen field of battle? Well, therein lies the rub. You hear the pop record, that much is undeniable; whether we're talking about a well-placed, uncharacteristic ballad like "Family Tree" or its boisterous follow-up, "Red Dress", there is no obscuring the fact that TVOTR is pushing all the right synaptic buttons. Yet what set the great mega-albums, the enduring pop lodestars apart was that they all came equipped with killer singles, and lots of them. Purple Rain produced "Let's Go Crazy", "When Doves Cry", and the title cut. Thriller birthed no fewer than seven monster singles, including "Billie Jean", "Beat It", "The Girl Is Mine", "Thriller", "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'", so on and so forth. (In fact, that was always the knock on Thriller: it sounded too much like a singles comp and not enough like a cohesive album, which is ridiculous, insofar as having too many good, eminently replayable pop smashes on your record could ever be considered a demerit - sounds more like a dentist admonishing a child against sweets than a rock critic evaluating an album to me.) The beat goes on: Born in the U.S.A. (title track, "Dancing in the Dark", "Glory Days"), So ("Sledgehammer", "Big Time", "Red Rain", "In My Eyes"), Slippery When Wet ("Livin' on a Prayer", "You Give Love a Bad Name", "Wanted Dead or Alive").
Dear Science, there is no other way to put this, never quite achieves orgasm. You have a string of superlative album cuts, and not one of them seems to get out in front and lead the parade. As such the album never quite catches the ear, never trips those subliminal wires that cause you to automatically tune into it when it's playing in the background. There is no earworm, no calling card for the id to recognize. You can either dedicate yourself to listening to Dear Science or you can ignore it - no middle ground is afforded you.
Certainly, it's not fair to demand that TV on the Radio turn into a singles band; though they're more than capable of producing one - "New Health Rock", "Wolf Like Me", "Staring at the Sun" - the album is more their metier. (Perhaps this explains the band's avowed interest in preserving the form.) Nonetheless, Dear Science is a manifestation of TVOTR's ambition to move beyond the cultural backwater that is Pitchfork's readership (sorry, but the road goes both ways) and into the mainstream; in order to fulfill that ambition they needed to bring at least one killer ap single to the party - a concession, perhaps, to the kids and their "disposable downloads and ring tones." One reads about the supposed flexibility of their deal with Interscope, the major label that underwrites them (and fellow [former] Williamsburgers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, leading me to wonder whether there was a quip pro quo at work or some A&R guy figured he'd get all his Christmas shopping done on Bedford Ave.), but the facts are these: a) no one signs with a major label without some pretense of getting bigger (unless you're Sonic Youth, perhaps) and b) if you don't get bigger, you're gonna get dropped. Clearly, from a commercial perspective, and no doubt an artistic perspective as well, going pop was the right move. While Dear Science is doubtlessly a good album - how good, I can't yet say without incurring the risk of doubling back on myself - it's not good enough, not accessible enough, not insistent enough that you're going to hear it on the radio. Or the TV.
