TV On The Radio - London Koko - 10/11/06
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Why do you do this to us? Don't you care? You're getting paid, aren't you, whilst the bunch of people who actually are fans of this music are paying your wages to even be here? Why aren't you doing your job? Why is the sound so appalling?!
Ok Mr. Soundman, perhaps it's something to do with having to make allowances for the Club NME night that follows TV On The Radio's set. I've heard it sound pretty shoddy on Friday nights here before. The rest of the review won't be merely a tirade against your performance. It'll be an appraisal of an excellent set from the main attraction themselves, a band whose craft cannot be ruined merely by the sound being a tad muddy.
TV On The Radio you see are a band who are a visual spectacle too, so much so that even if one were deaf it'd still be worth seeing this lot simply because of what you'd gain from knowing how much they're loving playing these songs for you. As a band, they're a futuristic rock outfit, blending soul and electronica with spaced out metal. As people, they're much more normal than that assessment of their sound paints them out - they're as amazed and delighted at the music they're producing as you are to see and hear them making it.
That in itself makes for quite the live set, but when the sound eventually gets sorted out a little it leaps up a few places in the quality league. Now, it's all fitting in to place, and songs like 'Let The Devil In' and 'Wolf Like Me' from this years 'Return to Cookie Mountain' LP are threatening shake the enormous glitterball down from above our heads where before we'd have struggled to distinguish them from the rest of the racket.
Now's just the right time then to unleash their masterpiece, their signature tune, their still celebrated and most familiar effort 'Staring at the Sun'. And unlike how we've seen it performed before, in a hurried manner devoid of tension, this closing rendition is note perfect, injected with enough upfront fervour to warrant a live reinterpretation and kept at that most magical of steady paces, it's the icing on the cake of an evening that for a while there wasn't shaping up to be too tasty, but one that was ultimately delectable.
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