With 12 years of professional releases under their belt, TV on the Radio’s trajectory is hard to trace. Their first releases, Young Liars EP and Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, drained their chirpy croons with murky adolescence, creaky basslines and half-realized love. TV on the Radio was coffee shop chic, yes, but also haunting. Seeds, TV on the Radio’s fifth full-length, marks an emotional shift. Here, love is no mere emotional hang-up, instead it is vivacious and necessary, a complicatedly beautiful element of life. Even in the trenches of love, singer Tunde Adebimpe sounds hopeful, and, dare I say, cheery.
This catharsis seems to be a response to the sudden death of bassist Gerard Smith, who succame to cancer in early 2011. The band has responded with an air of grace and newfound positivity: love’s hardship is a secondary concern in the face of the absurd and eternal. Clearly, this is a step forward in understanding and accepting death, a subject matter that is often eschewed in Western pop culture. But, critically, this catharsis results in TV on the Radio’s least fulfilling album. In denying its own musical spectrum, Seeds casts TV on the Radio into dangerous waters, where Adebimpe’s twang and simple rhymes veer closer to Hootie & the Blowfish than the sinister eclecticism of The Pixies.
So Seeds is a poppy album: Adebimpe’s autotuned sadness spoils a minimalist burn on “Test Pilot”; an odd tractor-hop break sticks out in “Love Stained”; the arena-rock bombast of “Careful You” lacks all subtlety, and the frank repetition of old love clichés wears thin. So Seeds is an intolerably poppy album, soiled with the same overbearing excess that marked the latter half of U2’s career.
Looking back at TV on the Radio’s output, it’s easy to see where the critics and the band delineated from one another. The brooding potential of Young Liars EP and, to a lesser extent, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, has hung over the band’s heads ever since–like that first week of school where students overenthusiastically create unrealistic expectations for themselves. This isn’t to say that TV on the Radio has been resting on their laurels, their discography holds some indie rock classics like Return to Cookie Mountain and Dear Science. But they haven’t followed the path dreamt up by first-listeners and critics, instead demanding, perhaps stubbornly, to take music making at their own pace. That may be the point of Seeds–it’s not our garden to sow, nor our lives to lead, so why tread on the grass? 5/10
