You’ve got to love an underdog. While The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs erupted out of the early 00s New York scene like molten jets of sexy-hot magma, TV On The Radio were the trendy awkwards loitering in the background. Never quite gorgeous enough to slap over your bedroom walls, but always and undoubtedly the coolest reference point for any budding noisemakers. Where their first two albums proper – the Nick Zinner-featuring ‘Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes’ and the Bowie-on-backingvocals brilliance of ‘Return To Cookie Mountain’ – set the bar high, their third ‘Dear Science,’, was perhaps not as smart as we’d have hoped. So, what’s in store for their fourth, ‘Nine Types Of Light’?
Well, the initial impression is that TV On The Radio’s in-house guru Dave Sitek – whose production credits have since included Scarlett Johansson, Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Foals – has morphed into Mark Ronson. Certainly, ‘Nine Types…’ suggests they have more in common than perhaps we would’ve previously liked to recognise; Dave too, it seems, will slap a brass section on anything. And while album-opener ‘Second Song’ showcases this penchant for horns quite brilliantly, on the whole, ‘Nine Types…’ struggles to match their past greatness. There’s ‘You’, a surprisingly chipper break-up song (“There’s no reason for letting go/I just thought I’d let you know/you’re the only one I ever loved”, croons a docile Tunde), that wouldn’t seem out of place soundtracking a Sex In The City ‘I got to thinking…’ moment. Then we have ‘No Future Shock’, where pounding tribal drums are invited to join Kyp’s trembling timbre as he commands “Dance! Don’t stop!” like it’s some sort of sinister nursery rhyme. There’s ‘Killer Crane’, which begins glacial and momentous before fragmenting into 70s folk guitars and a steel drum, the melody so carefree and familiar that you half expect Kyp to start assuring “it’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!”, whilst ‘Repetition’’s creepy “freak of nature” subject-matter prompts a cinematic breakdown at the end, transforming Tunde’s murmur into a theatrical Vincent Price homage. There are nods to the new wave, too; ‘Forgotten’’s sparse production points in a haunting dubstep direction, with shrill strings punctuating the ghostly tale of “Beverly Hills/nuclear winter/what should we wear and who’s for dinner?”
TV On The Radio are a band that, by default, seem to generate praise, but in truth they’ve not really been able to supercede the Trojan force of songs like ‘Staring At The Sun’ or ‘Wolf Like Me’. ‘Nine Types Of Light’ isn’t bad, but it’s damned hard to fall in love with and far from the career-defining album we’ve been waiting for.

Harriet Gibsone