I’ve been consistently amazed, through this process, at the way time (and a little distance) shapes your perception of an album, the way great records find a way to remain relevant to the listener at different stages of life. In the digital age, albums eventually get whittled down for a lot of listeners, myself included — the fat gets trimmed away, the tracklist gets whittled down into playlist fodder, and it becomes eminently easier to simply check out the highlights. TV on the Radio hit peak accessibility with their follow-up to this record, Dear Science, but the Brooklyn art-rockers had already been on the business end of reams and reams of gushing music-crit ink for their Return to Cookie Mountain. It’s a record that I liked just fine when it came out, but that’s been (incorrectly, it turns out) sanded down into a highlight-reel in the wake of total Spotify dominance.
So why include it on my list if I didn’t realize how fantastically listenable it is ten years after its release? The answer’s simple, friends: as you know from what you’ve seen on this countdown so far, I value the atmospheric record just as much as the exciting record, if it’s able to set the mood in a transportive, absorbing way. The problem isn’t where I ranked Return to Cookie Mountain on this list; it’s that I ranked it for the wrong reasons, incorrectly categorizing it as a “moody, atmospheric” album and not an “exciting” one.
Which, of course, isn’t to say that Return to Cookie Mountain isn’t moody or atmospheric. On the contrary: the mood-conjuring at play here is rather astonishing. TV on the Radio are architects of tracks, building elements brick by brick within a song until even the vocals – courtesy of the finest singing tandem in indie-rock, Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone – are chasing each other around the fringes of the cut. Big, cavernous drums and a plucked acoustic line seem to form the basis of opener “I Was A Lover”, until guitar-and-effects wizard Dave Sitek drops a big, bleating sample right into the middle of the rhythm. It sounds like everything, and also nothing; it’s melodic, yet chaotic, boozy, yet sobering. It sounds like a half-tuned orchestra trying to figure out how, if we were forced to express all of our emotions from now on without words, they would convey “regret”.
“Hours” sounds a little more traditional in the grand scheme of things, with deceptively tricky The National drums and plinking piano keys forming the foundation for some of Kyp Malone’s finest falsetto work. (Those keening “oooohs” in the intro are intoxicating, and maybe worth the price of entry by themselves.) “Province” sounds like a mid-tempo TV on the Radio song like any other, with Adebimpe’s strong baritenor and Malone’s sonorous falsetto intertwining mid-chorus, but it’s one that has the good sense to introduce David Bowie into the choir. The skeletal march of “A Method” is beguiling, all drums and an unbelievable melody; the percussive “Let the Devil In” sounds like garage rockers crashing a drum circle, complete with euphoric “whoa-oh-oh”s in the coda; “Dirtywhirl” feels so invitingly scuzzy, a rocker drunkenly staggering down a carnival midway, a track of such transfixing songcraft that it just caused me to space out thinking about it. And that’s to say nothing of “Wolf Like Me”, a savage, gritty lycanthrope barnburner that has earned its way onto every post-2006 Halloween party mix ever.
These are but several of the brilliant moments Return to Cookie Mountain commits to wax, and there are plenty more where they came from; TV on the Radio’s strength here is being hypnotic and exciting all at once without losing their place, fostering a mood just as urgently as it delivers peak after thrilling peak. Or, to put it more simply, it’s just really good music and you should listen to it.
Playlist track: “Dirtywhirl”
Drew's Album of the Day 