tvotr

A Week With TV On The Radio's "Return to Cookie Mountain": Day 4

29 September 2006
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Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Ally Ritchie
What I don’t want to do is listen to this record the same way I listen to every other rock and roll record I listen to. That said, the issue hasn’t been forced. It hasn’t been difficult to foster a new approach for sitting down with “Return to Cookie Mountain.” You can’t listen to this the same way you’ll listen to the new Decemberists next week. With “The Crane Wife,” there will be all of those new songs offering that newness as the draw—and Colin Meloy writes some beauts—but you’ll be expecting to hear those new songs in a familiar style and you’re not going to be disappointed. TV On The Radio doesn’t make me think about rock and roll at all. What we’ve got here is some genre-bending of incredible heft. This isn’t The Killers shucking Duran Duran for Bruce Springsteen—that’s just trading flavors. Instead of vanilla ice cream, this time they thought they’d go with chocolate. So what? Most of that British grime movement is hard to figure out. Dizzee Rascal…that was just PR people working overtime, right? Kano…pretty average stuff, correct? But Mike Skinner—The Streets—is fascinating and when I’m listening to “Return to Cookie Mountain” you can picture Skinner helping with it. It’s less rock and roll than it is “The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living” or “A Grand Don’t Come For Free.” It takes fantastical detours into different sideshows and dressings that seem to come from a mind splintered enough and inquisitive to the point of pulling off the things that only DJs attempt. It’s as if they were able to take themselves out of their own thought process and analyze their songs as a remix artist would, with fresh new ears. Then they put them back together and got something we all should concern ourselves with.

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