Some people know what they want and try really hard to get it,” says TV on the Radio multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek. “We’d rather write a song about robots fucking.” This oddball aesthetic is apparent on the band’s debut CD, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, a cool collage of electronic fuzz, jazz skronk, doo-wop vocals and dark pop.
The group’s mishmash of styles can be credited, in part, to singer Tunde Adebimpe’s unusual upbringing. Adebimpe spent several years of his childhood in Nigeria, where his father worked as a social worker. “We’d listen to Fela Kuti, and Indian and Pakistani music,” he says. “I remember getting a copy of the Beach Boys’ Smile and not being able to wrap my head around it. I loved it, but I was just like, ‘Is it music?’ ” After high school, Adebimpe moved to New York to pursue a filmmaking career. He rented a room in Brooklyn with Sitek, who was selling acrylic paintings and producing local bands such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars.
“He was a weird motherfucker,” Sitek says of Adebimpe. “There was no question we were gonna do something together.” The two made some demos, took their name from a friend’s random suggestion and set out gigging after adding Kyp Malone as another noisemaker (the band recently added a drummer and a bassist for its live shows).
TVOTR recorded much of Desperate Youth by improvising for hours, then picking out the best parts. Unable to play an instrument, Adebimpe used a pedal that allowed him to sing over his own beat-boxing. But for its entire chaotic sprawl, the album is still a coherent paean to youthful confusion.
Despite the band’s surprise success, Sitek claims TVOTR don’t plan on getting more professional. “We don’t have the attention span to find the ‘right’ way of doing things,” Sitek says. “And we’re highly susceptible to caffeine.”
The biggest TV on the Radio song of 2008 is, like many of the band’s songs, about romantic disappointment. The vocals are high-pitched and anguished, yet certain. Keyboards are played with slight imperfections that sound as if they were born of frustration. At the hook, the piece bursts alive with martial percussion, giving it an appealing bulk.
Whether Mr. West, the cool-hunting hip-hop superstar, had those Brooklyn art-rockers in mind when he recorded that song, the first single from his forthcoming fourth album, “808s & Heartbreaks,” isn’t known. And it’s possible that something from TV on the Radio’s third album, the recently released “Dear Science” (DGC/Interscope), might slither its way to pop acclaim.
But for now this band, which began a sold-out three-night stand at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple on Tuesday night, might be gaining more clout as an influence, a group revered by others, than as a success of its own. (The new album sold 34,000 copies in its first week, a small number, though still the band’s best showing to date.)
Maybe that’s because TV on the Radio often feels as if it’s looking, and playing, inward, demanding others to engage the group on its own terms. On Tuesday the band put on a serious-minded and intense show that was at times exuberant and at times overly studious.
But it never lacked for technical fluency. Tunde Adebimpe, the lead vocalist, was a dynamo. While the rest of the band largely remained still, he practically vibrated around the stage, his shuffling somehow rhythmic and awkward all at once. Visually and sonically, he was the band’s tension and its ecstasy — whistling and cooing at the outset of “Young Liars,” making his singing almost raplike on “Dancing Choose,” and crawling slowly and cleanly out of the band’s distortion on “Halfway Home.”
Kyp Malone handles most of the rest of the band’s vocals, his flat rasp a balance to Mr. Adebimpe’s spacey croon. On “Crying” he barked and howled, and on “Dreams” he sang glorious, punchy countermelodies while Mr. Adebimpe soared above him.
Given that it has two distinctive singers, it’s noteworthy that TV on the Radio prefers to envelop them in walls of noise: density is the calling card of this band, which also includes Dave Sitek, who produces the band’s music (as usual, he played the guitar generally with his back to the audience); Gerard Smith, who plays bass and keyboards; and the drummer Jaleel Bunton. (In places, the band was joined by a horn section: tenor and alto sax, trombone, trumpet.)
Few if any working rock bands have the rhythmic intelligence of TV on the Radio, and the interplay between Mr. Smith and Mr. Bunton was firm and vivid, especially on “Wolf Like Me,” on which they applied the brakes and brought the frenetic song to a slow melt. On “Satellite” Mr. Bunton played rapid-fire, brute-force patterns that shaped the rest of the song, forcing everyone else in line.
“Dear Science,” from which much of the show’s material was drawn, contains this band’s peppiest songs to date, including a handful of psychedelic disco-soul numbers (“Shout Me Out,” “Golden Age”) that didn’t quite translate here. And the moody “Love Dog” felt hollow and lagged a bit.
But the band shone on older songs. “The Wrong Way” marched with industrial skronk, and “A Method” was solemn, underpinned by Mr. Smith, whose melodies recalled a church organ, and Mr. Sitek, who furiously beat on timpani. The band closed with “Staring at the Sun,” the highlight of its first album and still among its best songs. Mr. Adebimpe’s falsetto vocals were improbably smooth. Mr. Smith’s bass gave the song thickness. And when Mr. Bunton burst through the thicket with his formidable drumming, it suggested a band in complete ownership of its sound, wherever it may roam.
