Gig Review: TV On The Radio, Club Academy, Manchester, 9th November 2006
When TV On The Radio played the Night and Day a couple of months ago I was very much undecided about them having only heard the first album, which didn’t make much of an impression, and “Dry Drunk Emperor”, the brilliant free mp3 they distributed in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. I didn’t go to that gig but bought their Return To Cookie Mountain album after it had garnered a number of dazzling reviews. It’s a great album, easily one of the best of 2006, so on the back of that I bought us tickets to the Club Academy gig. Unfortunately, JustHipper, who had managed to avoid listening to Cookie Mountain since I bought it, decided to put it in her car a couple of days before the gig. She hated it with a passion and told me in no uncertain terms what I could do with the ticket. Oh well, at least the gig had been sold out for weeks and I managed to sell the ticket on Scarlet Mist at a day’s notice (apologies to James at Yer Mam! who we met for the first time at last Tuesday’s Art Brut gig and found out that he would gladly have taken it).
Kicking off the evening were Belgian psychedelic stoner rockers White Circle Crime Club who were thoroughly entertaining and reminded me a lot of Oneida, which probably had as much to do with one of them wearing a rather fetching Oneida t-shirt as with their agreeably repetitive drone rock.
TV On The Radio began their excellent set with lead singer Tunde Adebimpe looping his own human beatbox before launching into Cookie Mountain highlight “Dirtywhirl”; a great opener, yes, but it was immediately obvious that the venue, with its steel pillars and low ceiling, could not handle the band’s expansive, multi-layered sound. Waves of guitar and drums poured forth over the crowd before crashing off harsh surfaces to deliver its dissonant wake into attendant ears. In normal circumstances this might have quelled my enjoyment of the gig but TV On The Radio put in such an electric performance that the sound problems barely seemed to matter. At the heart of it all was Adebimpe who was a whirlwind of motion, pacing back-and-forth across the small stage, mic in hand, his free hand in constant gesticulation. It was a shame his powerful voice was almost lost in the enveloping sonic soup. The guitar and vocal work of the striking Kyp Malone and the fearsome Dave Sitek frequently rose above the morass through pure force of will. There were many highlights in the set but “Wolf Like Me” stood out head and shoulders above the rest, the irresistible collective force generated by the band was overwhelming and deserves to be heard in bigger and better venues than Club Academy.