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Review: TV on the Radio at Stubb’s
A band as tirelessly innovative as TV on the Radio shouldn’t play the same songs in the same order back-to-back nights, but that’s exactly what happened Thursday at Stubb’s. The disappointing realization that a facsimile of the Houston show from the night prior was being transmitted — sure, practice makes perfect, but not when it comes at the expense of improvisation — only exacerbated sad but true comments made by a random concertgoer who came only for the opening band the Dirtbombs: TVOTR’s music is cold, dense and lacking in hooks.
Come to think of it, there aren’t many parts to their songs that you find yourself singing over and over in your head. But that doesn’t mean the words and melodies buried in the Brooklyn prog-rockers’ enthralling mix of industrial-strength loops and jazz-funk instrumentation aren’t poignant, because they are. Nor does it mean the show wasn’t any good, because it was.
A frantic, sped-up “The Wrong Way,” from their debut album “Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes,” had co-frontman Tunde Adebimpe likening himself to Barack Obama, when he sang about a new politician stirring inside him. This foreshadowing of change was taken to the next level on the next song, “Golden Age,” from TVOTR’s new album, “Dear Science.” Fellow co-frontman Kyp Malone sang about the utopian future that could result from said politician, while someone disguised as a ginger man cookie — perhaps in homage to TVOTR’s second album “Return to Cookie Mountain,” definitely in homage to Halloween — bounded about onstage.
Subsequent “Cookie Mountain” cuts “Province,” “Dirtywhirl” and “A Method,” with their a capella doo-wops and unified hand claps running up against the seven-piece’s guitar squalls, droning synths and skronking horns, continued to define TVOTR’s brand of music as the shape of things to come for soul. There just wasn’t much soul in the rehearsed way that sound played out.
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