tvotr

A Week With TV On The Radio's "Return to Cookie Mountain": Day 2

23 September 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Ally Ritchie
Not only does this record defy gravity, but it puts a spell on you. Without really meaning to fall for it, the angularity and the significance of this one vision—shrouded in a return to a mountain made out of cookies, like something that would have been addressed in “Goonies” or “Follow That Bird,” wherein Big Bird is looking for his real parents and thinks they’re dodos—that’s gripping and much more serious than a Sesame Street spin-off. The tone of this magnificent TV on the Radio record is one of suspense and rain clouds. It’s one of evil deeds and helplessness. You come away from it—twice now—with eyes and a head feeling as if they were connected with the assistance of a spirograph, webbing them together with mathematical curves and preventable calamity. Malone and Adebimpe have seen the world go up into flames and smoke and their role in the aftermath (though the aftermath remains so agonizingly present) is to pull together all of their ire and try to get to their personal bottoms. It’s politically minded albums such as this one that probably should be how history remembers the dissent that has been widespread among a great majority of this country for the past five years. It’s not an overloaded blast of fuck you-ism, but a rational attempt and success at capturing the unbelievable wastefulness and nonsensical motives of this war we’re waging and the wars others are waging with the debilitating numbness of it all. There is pain and suffering and confusion in these lyrics, but they don’t come out as rage at all. They show themselves appearing as the strong, yet wounded. They say, “We’re mad as hell, but we don’t know what to do anymore,” as everything continues “as planned” and the results show no signs of improvement.

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