[The New Classics is a reoccurring segment in which we examine our favorite indie releases that are bound to replace our parent’s “classic rock” stash hidden in the attic or the basement. These aren’t reviews, these are uneditied testimonies and opinions about why we love what we love. Can we get a witness?]

Words by Jacob Barron

Album: Return to Cookie Mountain
Released: July 2006
Label: 4AD/Interscope
Produced by: David Andrew Sitek

I remember reviews for TV On The Radio‘s Return to Cookie Mountain being overwhelmingly positive. Best of the year, Dave Sitek’s a genius, et cetera, et cetera, there was just no escaping the good in this album. It could end world hunger, make you impossibly thin and cure dropsy. Even “Rolling Stone” liked it, and this was just at the point when their review section started tipping from semi-insightful criticism into saying either “This rocks!” or “This does not rock!” all while doling out five stars to whatever Bono left in his golden toilet that week.

I hadn’t quite refined my palette for weirdness by 2006, but I did pay slavish attention to music criticism and, like a dead-eyed automaton dressed in an ironic t-shirt, I bought this album (or downloaded it, whatever), and, to be honest, I was put off. I mean sure, a few of the songs were immediately attractive to my then still-virginal indie sensibilities, and I’ll get to those later, but there’s so much in here and not a lot of it is pretty. That isn’t to say it isn’t good, just that it isn’t pretty like so much of what I was listening to then. The album has very few cherubic, jangly guitar lines or straight, easy-to-follow drum parts. There’s jazz in here, there’s syncopation, and then there’s noise in no small measure, big farting saxophones, doubled off-key vocal lines and crashing drums. It was too much all at once, or at least it was for me, in 2006.

At first listen, I gravitated only to “Province” and “Wolf Like Me.” It seriously took me at least three months to get past “Province.” That wall of guitars on the chorus probably affected my taste in music more than any of the dozens of other albums I bought that year (or downloaded, whatever). Lyrics like “Love is the province of the brave” could sound like cheese coming from anyone else, but when I heard it here, I felt like they meant it. It’s a simple, universal metaphor, but that wave of fuzz and guitar moans actually completed the landscape for me, like saying yes, love is a province, and this is what it sounds like to live there.

And let’s just get this out of the way now: “Wolf Like Me” is ferocious. So ferocious that it threatens to swallow the entire album whole, and kind of does. Tunde Adebimpe’s vocals have never been more conventional, but that somehow manages to make them seem even more aggressive. A ringing wall of distorted guitars fills in the gaps, and then that breakdown hits and you get a moment to breathe, before the shouts come back and “we’re howlin’ / forever” layers over everything until it breaks.

Both of these songs are intense, but they were my doorway into the rest of the album. They’re vicious but accessible, firmly planted in easy-to-trace rock and punk rock tropes that have been exaggerated and amplified into something monumental. They’re the callused handshake that welcomes you into the fight club.

This is an album to listen to on repeat really. It’s like a good movie, where each time you revisit it, you notice something else that makes you love it even more. “Playhouses,” which sounded stressed on first listen, sounds awesomely tense and jittery now, and is probably the song I’d most want to see them play live. “A Method” sounded empty when I first heard it, but now it sounds like a boy scout sing-a-long going progressively awry, starting with a jolly whistled melody and then collapsing into clattering drums and echoed voices. “I Was A Lover” has to be one of the strangest album openers in recent memory, but it’s thrilling, like everything is taking place right on the edge, especially the horn samples that sound like they’ve almost found the beat, but not quite. Really every song is a monument to the virtue of throwing stuff against a wall and seeing what sticks. Everything is here, every impulse and idea that the band had ever had, all of it filtered through Dave Sitek’s motherfucking genius mind and lovingly put to tape.

I couldn’t have made this comparison when I first heard the album, but, in its own way, Return to Cookie Mountain”reminds me of “Voodoo” by D’Angelo. That album was not indie, not rock and certainly not indie rock either, and it was most notable for the song “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” the music video for which featured D’Angelo singing to the camera, butt naked. Remember it? His abs drove the ladies crazy, and the attention pretty much drove him crazy and ruined his career. Anyway, I only got into “Voodoo” last year even though it came out in 2000, and it’s an easy-to-like R&B/Soul album that emphasizes “feel” more than the actual beat. Things don’t always line up correctly on the album and it can be kind of jarring at first, but it makes the whole thing feel alive and improvised, even if you know that that’s impossible. It’s like the songs are being pushed along by something greater than an agreed-upon structure, feeling their way through the whole album in the dark. It’s the same thing with Return to Cookie Mountain I think, minus the naked music video.

Dear God, someone light a match: 10 out of 10 farting baritone saxophones!

1. “I Was a Lover”
2. “Hours”
3. “Province”
4. “Playhouses”
5. “Wolf Like Me”
6. “A Method”
7. “Let the Devil In”
8. “Dirtywhirl”
9. “Blues from Down Here”
10. “Tonight”
11. “Wash the Day”
12. [ambient audio]

Filed under: New Classics, Not Blake, Jim, or Brendan