Maximum Balloon
‘Maximum Balloon’
(Fiction)

Well, Dave Sitek was never gonna stride into centrestage, was he? Instead, the brains behind TV On The Radio is now the brains behind Maximum Balloon, who are – on this evidence – a sort of trendy version of Gorillaz, cherry-picking the coolest guest vocalists. There’s Karen O (yelping “Gimme that beat!” on ‘Communion’), Little Dragon (on the Kraftwerky ‘If You Return’), and David Byrne, who spends his ‘Apartment Wrestling’ cameo sumo-ing with a vocoder. Inevitably, Sitek’s day-job mates surface too, in the form of Tunde Adebimpe – on ‘Absence Of Light’ – and Kyp Malone on ‘Shakedown’. As a result, ‘Maximum Balloon’ never feels anything other than a TV On The Radio album with a few guest vocals. No bad thing, but it’s nothing earth-shaking either.

JJ Dunning