In an era cluttered up by dozens of second- and third-generation
mutant clones of the White Stripes and the Strokes,
it's not often you hear music compared —
with a straight face, and by Rolling Stone, no less — to the musical highlights of
artists as experimentally extravagant and genre-defying as David Bowie and Prince. By and large, kids
these days don't want to spend a lot of time writing something complicated that could collapse under
its own weight. They don't want to explore ever-shifting psychedelic soundscapes in the guise of
philosopher-prince-warrior-adventurers. They want to rawk.
Return to Cookie Mountain is a slap in the face to the low musical expectations that have
given birth to so many recent albums of high-irony, low-talent, high-profit indie rock. Its first
track, "I Was a Lover" lays out a field of stuttering percussion, looping brass, layered noise
and gorgeously soaring vocals that overwhelms as it seduces; it's not complicated because it's
insecure or incompetent, it's complicated because it's busy painting a goddamned masterpiece. All
those extra brushstrokes are filling in context and providing depth. They're content,
not noise.
This ferocious economy of thundering volume and precise order continues throughout the length of
the disc. There are moments when the sound is disorienting or surprising, but it never falls
into repetition or cliché. By itself, that makes the album notable as an artistic benchmark.
But on top of this virtuosity, there are a number of tracks on the disc that simply kick tremendous
amounts of ass.
"Wolf Like Me" opens with the kind of stripped-down menace that distinguished Elliott Smith's
"Needle in the Hay," which unto itself was one of the creepiest and most compelling tracks to
come out this side of Robert Johnson. But it
quickly builds, layering on pulsing, up-tempo percussion and tight, clear, staccato lyrics that
sound in their understated raw power like dead-on throwbacks to the best of 1950s rock 'n' roll.
With "Wolf Like Me," it's entirely possible that TV on the Radio have written one of the best
driving songs in recent years — an unscientific experiment demonstrated consistent gains of
15-20 MPH over the highway speed limit when the track was played at high volume.
Moments of clarity aside, the lyrical content of Return to Cookie Mountain is often
comprehensible only in snatches that waft out occasionally from within the sonic tornado of drum
machines, falsetto howling and sometimes stunning tempo shifts that continually threatens to
obliterate any intelligible thread of meaning or organization.
And yet, you're never lost in the woods for long. An element — a pulsing beat, a hypnotic
refrain ("There is hardly a method you know / There is hardly a method you know"), a particularly
star-crossed and beautiful alignment of unexpected instruments — always refocuses your attention.
"A Method," which boasts a hook that's as vivid as it is enigmatic, builds up from a cold opening
of whistling and handclaps, and uses a doo-wop style of vocal delivery to deliver its message. At its end,
it fades back into its opening moments, a hauntingly elegant cycle of melody that sounds almost entirely
unlike anything anyone's ever recorded before. In fact, that sentiment broadly describes much of the album.
At times, you can hear elements of the Talking Heads, Donovan, Massive Attack, Depeche Mode, Morphine
and countless others trickling through the matrix of sound that comprises Return to Cookie Mountain. But
for all the checks and echoes, there seems to be very little theft involved. With Return to Cookie Mountain,
TV on the Radio have done the nearly impossible: they've cooked up something original and good.
— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)
