CD reviews

TV on the Radio
Dear Science
(Interscope)
*8.5*

Goes well with: Brian Eno, Yeasayer, stuff white people like

TV on the Radio’s newest release, Dear Science, may not be their best, but it’s their most cohesive, consistently engaging offering yet. Though initially seeming pasty in comparison to Return to Cookie Mountain, Dear Science earns its praise via a continual stream of good-to-very-good songs. Instead of wedging a few great tracks between filler, TVOTR have crafted an album that, upon repeat listens, feels singular and smeared together; the transcendent moments still exist, but they’re more evenly distributed.

Since 2003’s Young Liars EP, TVOTR have been at their peak when marrying disparate elements, and the vocal boomerang between Tunde Adebimpe’s unhinged yelping and Kyp Malone’s soulful crooning remains the building block of their success at fusing extremes. It’s a credit to guitarist-producer Dave Sitek that the songs can feel both experimental and accessible. “Red Dress” and “Dancing Choose,” in particular, import enough dance-party-ready funkiness to compel even the most awkward of Caucasians to bust a move. While Adebimpe and Malone fill their songs with anxiety and uncertainty in bulk, they both brim with an optimistic and joyous spirit. The world may be ending, but TVOTR will find something worth celebrating until that moment comes.
—Ian Rick

TV on the Radio play Saturday, Nov. 8, at 4th & B.

Castanets
City of Refuge
(Asthmatic Kitty)
*6.5*

Goes well with: Calexico, The Album Leaf, The Black Heart Procession

San Diego’s Castanets is really Ray Raposa, an enigmatic mastermind of what he’s called “experimental Americana,” though a label that expansive might be misleading. In the past, members of Pinback, Rocket from the Crypt and Tristeza have contributed to his stark, Western-themed collections, as have Sufjan Stevens and Ero Gray. At first, the roots-heavy, eerily sparse desert-folk may seem at odds with the good-time stereotypes of our sunny metropolis, but it’s actually an introverted extrapolation of what higher-profile acts like The Black Heart Procession and The Album Leaf have done for years.

Boiled down to a guitar and a processor, Raposa’s brief and inspiring tracks on City of Refuge were dreamed up in a motel room in Overton, a Nevada town not quite in the middle of nowhere, but certainly just a few miles up the highway from it. To call these songs skeletal is to accuse bones of obesity, but they’re strangely effective, especially if blasted from car speakers while driving through the desert east of Joshua Tree (as this writer can attest to personally).

But the brevity of most of the tracks leaves even the most forgiving of listeners wanting more and, unfortunately, wondering if there isn’t more where that came from. “Songs” like “High Plains 3” are hardly songs at all, just white-noise practical jokes that certainly aren’t as amusing on the other end of the speakers.
—Will K. Shilling

Drew Andrews
Only Mirrors
(Minty Fresh)
*8.0*

Goes well with: The Postal Service, The Album Leaf, Thom Yorke

To paraphrase Lisa Stansfield, Drew Andrews has been around the world, and he can’t find his baby. For the last five years, the one-time Via Satellite frontman has been continent-hopping with Jimmy LaValle as a touring member of The Album Leaf. It’s easy to see the songs on Andrews’ long-belated debut album, Only Mirrors, coming from those travels. They reek of lonely, restless nights in the back of tour buses or strange hotel rooms, but lucky for us, he found a way to channel the restlessness into a lush suite of songs that compare with anything else he’s worked on.

The album opens like a great, lost Simon and Garfunkel side with Andrews plucking forlorn acoustic blues, segueing into the lush “I Could Write a Book.” He walks the same Clinton Street on “Angeli” that Leonard Cohen did on “Famous Blue Raincoat” and searches for love and light in the desert on “I Will, You Won’t.” It all adds up to a local album that doesn’t feel at home at all.

Whether he intended to or not, Andrews has made an album in the vein of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Beck’s Sea Change. And where Mirrors might not overtly be about heartbreak, its lack of subjective clarity is unmistakably its greatest strength. Not lost, not fully destined, Andrews knows that the only things keeping him from the past are the headlights in front of him.
—Seth Combs

Drew Andrews plays at 3 p.m. on Nov. 23 at M-Theory Records.