Rikard Rehnbergh reviews the US band TV On The Radio recent performance and gets caught in the heat.
Kyp Malone Photo: Christian Kock
Alternative indie arty funky punky post-rock act TV On The Radio (TV) gave a, literally speaking, sweaty performance at the club Debaser (the name taken from the classical Pixies-track from 1989) at Södermalm in Stockholm. The vocalist Tunde Adebimpe was sweating floods from his hair and beard inside the hothouse club, meanwhile the rain was pouring down outside, and fellow member and singer Kyp Malone was keeping his cool in an African tunicle. But the very expectant audience also perspired during the show, which in the beginning was a bit pending, but it took the second half of the show and the end to really liven it up!
The lion’s share of the concert was dedicated to the latest album, Dear Science (2008), which has received both some serious reviews and a wider public acknowledgement. And with the opening chords and bonus track thereof, Halfway Home, the crowd was not only all ears, but also all body. The band added a sixth extra member to honour the night, standing beside the producer and multi-instrumentalist David Andrew Sitek, who blew some wicked horn (sax) adding a certain jazzy spice to the music, an enrichment of the musical bouquet, not yet heard on the albums.
The band’s backdrop was made of a huge patchwork quilt with some patches corresponding in pattern and colour and others not. Very symbolic for the band: arty, several members are in to pictorial art beside the musical ditto; and eclectic, the music spans through numerous diverse genres: from accapella and electronica, punk and dub to free jazz and soul, hip-hop and rock’n’roll.
This eclectic approach to the music is woven into the fact that they “change” instruments: – We had a gig in Iceland where we needed a full band so we asked the two best guitar players we knew, Gerard and Jaleel, to play drums and bass. It’s absurd that Kyp and I are even holding a guitar when Jaleel and Gerard are fucking bananas at playing it! explains Sitek with a laugh.
 Back to the show, Jaleel Bunton (drums/vocals/loops) and Gerard Smith (bass/keyboards) held the rhythm section tight like a clamped clam and a hectic, jumping, and punkish version of Wolf Like Me, from the LP Return to Cookie Mountain (2006), was smashing like a Beck gone mad, and got the crowd to their feet alright. Another dance floor-killer was a techno, up-tempo, speeded up take of the track Staring at the Sun, from the debut EP Young Liars (2003), groovy like a Björk gone black.
TV was formed in 2001 in NYC and has released some six EP’s, and they continue to release them in between their albums, the three acclaimed LP’s, and that’s hip, cat: vinyl rules! One could call the band, slightly sloppy, a Brooklyn version of Radiohead, but the fact is that their first full length piece, called OK Calculator (2002), an on-line record and a minor classic with cult status on the independent and alternative scene, is a paraphrase or pastiche – judge for yourself! – Of Radiohead’s milestone OK Computer from 1997 (which you can also find in a dub version under the artist name of Radiodread, a Jamaican coterie which has also made alternative versions of Dub Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd) and Easy Stars Lonely Hearts Dub Band (Beatles).
What one lacked at the gig was a bit of female touch, some female vocals, for example. It would have been welcome to hear the charismatic Swedish Japanese singer Yukimi Nagano, from the support act Little Dragon, sing and perform with the band as Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead has done before. Even though TV are PC (politically correct!) they still make records and give shows that are not macho, far from that, but somewhere near a bunch of boys having a swell time together with their toys, machines and instruments like!
The encore rounded up the hour and a half concert with three tracks, among them a massive version of A Method from Return to Cookie Mountain where the Gothenburg brethren of Little Dragon joined in on drums and percussions, like some medieval procession and session or a carnival drum band in Recife, Brasil. And the band played on at Storsjöyran in Östersund, and then back to US of A, at the mother of indie festivals: Lollapalooza outside Chicago.
Rikard Rehnbergh
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