FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
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IN this Vinyl Corner…
I am including an album that turns fifteen quite soon. I am not overly-familiar with TV on the Radio, through I do really like their album, Return to Cookie Mountain. It is an album that I think people should pick up on vinyl, as it is brilliant. The New York band are still going and put out their fifth album, Seeds, in 2014. I think that Return to Cookie Mountain is their finest release. If you are not familiar with it, maybe stream the songs first. You will want to convert to vinyl, as the songs require repeated listens and full attention. I am going to bring in a couple of reviews for a terrific album. First, it is worth bringing in some background about Return to Cookie Mountain:
“Return to Cookie Mountain is the second studio album by American rock band TV on the Radio. It was released July 6, 2006, worldwide by 4AD, and issued in the U.S. and Canada on September 12, 2006, by Interscope Records and Touch and Go Recordings. The North American release features three bonus tracks, two of which are B-sides from the single "Wolf Like Me"; the other is a remix of "Hours" by El-P. Videos were made for the singles "Wolf Like Me" and "Province".
The album featured several notable guest vocalists: "Province" features backing vocals from David Bowie, who championed the band's full-length debut, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes; Katrina Ford of the band Celebration guests on "Wolf Like Me", "Let the Devil In" and "Blues from Down Here"; Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead sings on "Hours". This is their first album to feature the keyboardist Gerard Smith”.
It is interesting learning more about the run-up to the album and the political context in which it was released. In 2018, Vinyl Me Please examined the album and discussed the importance and strengths of Return to Cookie Mountain:
“Return to Cookie Mountain takes its name from the Super Mario World level, obviously, but not in any way that has ever been explained. It’s not like singer Tunde Adebimpe has ever come out as a staunch Nintendo fan who owned a Virtual Boy, or Sitek ever extolled the virtues of royal blue bib overalls. But wanting to return to a fantasy world, where the good guys are plumbers who ride long-tongued dinosaurs and the bad guys are mutated mushrooms and turtles throwing hammers, instead of living in the present of 2006 — with its endless war, its feeling like the end was nigh, and its democratically elected presidents leaving people in their own country to die in a flood — was understandable. Desirable, even.
2006 was a very bad year. Americans were halfway into the second Bush II term, and only months removed from his administration making a defacto public policy to ignore the dying black people in New Orleans during the fallout of Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster to hit America since the colonists made landfall at Plymouth Rock. The war in Iraq, then into its third year, showed no signs of being near a resolution, despite Bush dressing up in pilot cosplay and announcing Mission Accomplished. Everyday brought a new existential worry, a new way the U.S. government had manipulated reporters into backing foreign wars, a new indignity placed upon different parts of the populace. Post-9/11, it felt like we were on the endless conveyor belt to World War III, a multi-front battle that would take our troops from North Korea to Iraq to wherever else the Axis of Evil was deemed to spin. It was a different kind of dread than the one we experience in 2018; it was still novel to believe the U.S. government was on the brink of collapse back then.
It was as explicit as TV on the Radio ever got about the man sitting in the White House, but the message was clear: TV on the Radio were writing about the present, and the present had them down. The specter of the world of worries of 2006 hangs over Retrun to Cookie Mountain like ashes.
These are desperation songs, the full spectrum of post-9/11 anguish and angst distilled into 11 tracks. The most beautiful, resonant song here — “Province” — is about how in uncertain times, the bravest thing you can do as a human is choosing to love someone completely. The song that ended up in Rock Band 2, “Wolf Like Me,” is about how desire — for sex, for power, for success — makes you into a literal animal. The middle of the record is buoyed by songs that sound like they’re being performed by a chain gang in the 7th circle of hell. It’s not light reading.
It’s also the culmination of the arc of New York rock in the ‘00s — though they got famous in Brooklyn, drummer Jaleel Bunton is a star of Meet Me in the Bathroom for the stories he picked up bartending for the Strokes and others at Max Fish on the Lower East Side, which places TV on the Radio in both lineages — and the start of everything that came after. New York rock in the ‘00s was initially marked by new bands in the Lower East Side “bringing rock back from the dead”; the decade would close with bands in Brooklyn stretching the fabric of rock into microgenres too vast and varied to describe in any complete way here. That change was largely spearheaded by TV on the Radio, a band who took ‘70s prog rock, soul, New York punk, noise rock, and instrumental wizardry and melded it into Return to Cookie Mountain, their masterpiece, an album of spiritual campfire reveries for a great cataclysm.
While “Wolf Like Me” and “Province” are the twin peaks of Cookie Mountain, the album’s strength is in how it toes the line between subtlety and big, in-your-face moments, not only song-to-song, but in songs themselves. “A Method” goes from a barbershop quartet singing in a bombed-out building to a percussive gunfight at the end. “Let The Devil In” crescendos from Malone singing quietly over a drumline, till it becomes a full-throated, everything-but-the-kitchen sink bang-and-wail. All the group shouts fall away for the album’s penultimate song, “Tonight,” still the most beautiful ballad in the surprisingly deep TV on the Radio ballad songbook — they’ll never get credit for how good their ballads are —a song that reassures you that despite all the dread, and the deals-with-the-devil that are made earlier on the album, you have one life to live, and trying to let things go and living it is all you really have. “Life deals a measly portion, light on good friends and fortune,” Adebimpe sings over a tambourine and droning guitars, before concluding “Your busted heart will be fine, in its tell tale time, so give it up, tonight.” “I think everyone in the band is a closet optimist,” Adebimpe would later tell Spin in a cover story.
And that might be the ultimate message of Return to Cookie Mountain. While the album was created with guitar pedals and ennui, it resolves that to stay alive and sane in the world, you need to believe in love, believe in your ability to overcome your base instincts, believe in the power of being together with other people, and believe in the power of your art to give you personal liberation. A return to the innocence and fantasy of before might not be possible, but this album has no choice but to try”.
I am going to finish off with a couple of reviews. It is interesting to see how various sites and reviewers approached Return to Cookie Mountain. In their review, this is what The A.V. Club had to say:
“The music feels as loose as ever, almost improvised at times. The opening track, "I Was A Lover," establishes the rules: The song lacks any kind of verse-chorus structure, and it's constructed mostly with a simple beat, washes of distortion that sound like white noise, and vocals by members Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe. It's a bold song whose warm experimentalism will either click with listeners or turn them off.
A straightforward song doesn't arrive until track five, "Wolf Like Me," with its propulsive, steady drumming and melodic chord progression. But TV On The Radio still layers the song with noisy, though not distracting, layers of sound. (The band later repeats the style on "Blues From Down Here.") Throughout, Cookie Mountain rolls like a ship on water, steering into experimental moments, then gently rolling into less outré tracks. Yet even the group's more adventurous passages—like the droney "Tonight"—shouldn't alienate listeners outright; the warm, harmony-laden vocal interplay (which adds David Bowie on one track) always provides something to grasp.
TV On The Radio's 2004 album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, seemed to lose its way during its later tracks, as if the band was swimming somewhere, but stopped to tread water before arriving. To a certain extent, Cookie Mountain suffers from repetition by the end, even before the three bonus tracks arrive. The noisy guitars of the eight-minute "Wash The Day Away" too closely resemble "I Was A Lover" and "Playhouses," but the song nevertheless feels conclusive. TV On The Radio previously seemed content to roam the open horizon; here, it's intent on exploring the far side. The journey is, once again, enthralling”.
The final review I’ll bring in is from Entertainment Weekly. They went deep and explored the phenomenal Return to Cookie Mountain with real respect and affection:
“The first song on Return to Cookie Mountain, the third album from TV on the Radio, drops the listener into a besieged bunker in the middle of some unnamed war. ”Held up in a luxury suite behind a red barricaded door,” a voice moans. Guitars emit a disquieting end-of-the-world hum until they fog up the senses, then recede. A sad orchestra bleats out funereal chords, and a piano tolls, over and out. The war this Brooklyn quintet describes is more emotional and metaphorical than literal, and it serves as an ominous opener for the album, a dystopian soundtrack in the tradition of art-of-noise classics by David Bowie (Scary Monsters), Radiohead (OK Computer), and Tricky (Pre-Millennium Tension).
These visual artists-turned-sonic architects have always loved to combine dread and drone. Now they’ve got the songs to go with their mastery of things-falling-apart atmosphere. Sometimes they drift into melodrama, but even ripe lines such as ”Hold your heart courageously as we walk into this dark place” are redeemed by the harmonies of Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone. You won’t hear airier, more evocative singing on a rock record this year, from the Beach Boys-like dissonant harmonies on ”A Method” to the eerie counterpoint vocals of ”Hours.”
Studio chemist Andrew Sitek and the rest of the Radio gang turn the agitated introspection of ”Wash the Day Away” into unlikely grandeur, push ”Wolf Like Me” until it surges into a cold-sweat anthem, and construct a hypnotic reverie out of guitar, piano, and muted percussion on ”Province” (with a vocal assist from fan David Bowie).
The savvier arrangements, brimming with unsettling sound effects, put Cookie Mountain several steps ahead of its fine 2004 predecessor, Desperate Youth, Bloody Thirsty Babes. If the voices of Adebimpe and Malone are the album’s soul, the soundscapes-turned-songs are its unshakable foundation”.
If you cannot get the vinyl then listen to Return to Cookie Mountain online. Ahead of its fifteenth anniversary, I wanted to highlight one hell of an album! It still holds so much power and mesmeric quality so many years after its release. I would definitely recommend people investigate…
A stunner from 2006.