CD reviews

TV on the Radio, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Golden Bear

TV on the Radio conquers 'Cookie Mountain'

Monday, July 17, 2006

TV on the Radio

'Return to Cookie Mountain'

(4AD/Interscope)

It's been a dense three years for these guys, also known as TVOTR. The quintet exploded onto an unsuspecting indie-rock scene in the summer of 2003 with the EP "Young Liars." The brief set collected four songs of modernized post-punk, but they managed to avoid nearly every cliché associated with their Brooklyn neighbors also pimping the same genre. "Liars" blended all sorts of sounds — electronica, operatic background vocals, a cooling industrial rumble and that proggy R&B singing Peter Gabriel invented — into something weirdly hypnotic.

They've been trying to follow it up ever since. The 2004 album "Desperate Youths, Bloodthirsty Babes" felt lacking and sounded cluttered. The 2005 EP "New Health Rock" was just a misfire. But the band may have cut its Gordian knot on "Cookie Mountain."

TVOTR never made much sense on Touch and Go, not as much for that label's noise-rock pedigree but for the band's obvious aspirations to reach the masses. "Cookie" is clearly a major-label album. Opener "I Was a Lover" pushes and pulls a wall of guitars against hip-hop breaks, live drums and synth moans. Singer Tunde Adebimpe continues to refine his croon and finds a logical foil in David Bowie, who shows up on "Province." One can easily see Bowie wondering either a) why he didn't make this album or b) wondering if he had.

The smoking "Wolf Like Me" approaches kinetic fury, while the set closer "Wash the Day Away" is the band's "A Day in the Life." But it's the ballad "A Method" that finds the band's emotional center — an urban romanticism that's half bodega, half art gallery. TVOTR is clearly at home in either.

—Joe Gross

---

Ray Wylie Hubbard

'Snake Farm'

(Sustain)

Ray Wylie Hubbard likes to put words together that don't normally go. On "Mother Hubbard's Blues," he growls about a woman who "loves God and overdubs"; his world is filled with "shameless women and pork rinds." It's all about "Heartaches and Grease," young pups; it just takes "a few kilowatts of sweat and grace" to get through this world alive.

His words are saddlebags, "one is filled with music, one is filled with thunder," as he sings on the percolating praise song "Resurrection," which closes the album like the slid-shut wooden window of a confessional. Eternal and lowdown, indeed.

"Snake Farm" is one of the most restrained, introspective, soft-spoken blues-rock albums out there. Oh, but it will rock you. Like J.J. Cale, Hubbard finds the real power of his music in the tension and anticipation. You'll find yourself trying to finish lines for him on first listen, and you'll stomp your heel sore as you join the rhythm section. Guitarist Gurf Morlix gives you just enough riff to lean on, but not enough to climb.

This record is R.L. Burnside before his morning coffee, ZZ Top with an inner-ear infection. It's familiar and eerie, where the tradition meets the unknown. This is Delta blues . . . from the Mekong Delta.

"If it's in the groove everybody loves it," Hubbard quotes Howlin' Wolf on "Rabbit," one of the LP's two strongest cuts ("Live and Die Rock and Roll" being the other). Then he follows with a constant theme of his songs: "We've a short time to be here," he repeats three times, "so get out of your rut and get in the groove."

Ray Wylie Hubbard's been driving to "Snake Farm" for the past 10 years, when the blues started taking over his songs. And now he's there, a full-fledged bluesman with a record that puts a whole lot of grit to the wit.

— Michael Corcoran

---

Golden Bear

'Golden Bear'

(C-Sides)

There always will be a market — mass, cult, whatever — for indie rock this vibrant, harmonies this close and feelings this good. Austin's own Golden Bear has a sonically mid-fi quality that, at first listen, seems to smear together the details of its rushing power pop. But your head adjusts soon enough, and suddenly the clarion-call trumpets, piano magic and fuzzy-wuzzy guitars that aren't above breaking out a quick, wheedling solo spring into focus. After all, songs this strong generate a motion and power of their own, powered by a seemingly endless wellspring of hooks and asides. Some of the tunes feature as many as 10 folks banging on trash cans and fooling with the space echo, which certainly will remind some people of ultra-hip pop collectives such as the Arcade Fire. What's really impressive is that Golden Bear easily can give the sainted Fire a run for the money in tunes, energy and sheer exuberance.

(Golden Bear plays a free show at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Pfluger Park in Pflugerville.)

— J.G.