silence kit #12

TV On The Radio
Return To Cookie Mountain [Interscope, 2006]

When Scott Walker released The Drift in 2006, I wasn’t paying too much attention to it. I was pretty turned off by the music’s bleakness, its lack of humor. Music journalists were shitting all over themselves about the percussionist on Walker’s record hitting a slab of meat for beats or something, but I wasn’t getting into it. Maybe I was enjoying myself too much then, and that life was still relatively good. I think that’s probably it. Everybody gets occasionally deceived by an instance of fragile happiness.

But I also recall Christmas that year to be utterly depressing, for various reasons I won’t want to go into too much. Only then did I got around and listen to the Scott Walker record. Things in those dark and brooding songs start to slowly surface and make sense. But mostly I listened to a lot more of TV On The Radio. Return To Cookie Mountain had came out a few months earlier that year. (I was listening to the leaked version instead, by the way, the one with the song sequence all jumbled up and kicking off with the rocket-propelled “Wolf Like Me” – it is clearly the better version.)

Personal miserabilia aside, perhaps paranoid imagination (well, mine at least) is the common denominator here, and TV On The Radio has Walker well beaten. Credit is due to the industrial wall of sound David Andrew Sitek engineered for Cookie Mountain. The sense of punishing claustrophobia Sitek builds around Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone’s vocals is deceptively simple and yet so radically insidious, providing the ideal soundboard to take in the group’s divergent ideas – from the atmospheric swamp blues of “I Was A Lover” to the communicable funk of “Let The Devil In”, practically anything goes. The end effects of Cookie Mountain’s alien sound design are startling and vivid, or downright spooky at times, none more so than the lonesome whistle summoning a barbershop quartet from hell on “A Method” while Adebimpe and Malone harmonize on some truly wicked shit: “I'm a storm-faced cloud, hanging in dystrophy/ I'm a cold-base clown laughing at enemies”. What the two sing about aren’t particularly clear but the songs and their enigmatic glow most certainly create a portrait of a sickly epoch (barricaded lust, disintegrating worlds, meaningless wars) that feels uncomfortably close to the bone.