TV on the Radio guitarist Dave Sitek rocks with wind chimes, seriously. He hangs the things off the headstock of his guitar, sometimes playing with them right by the mic, so their twinkling snuck out around his thrashing. There must be symbolism there.
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TV on the Radio
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 Entertainment
Art
Metro
Chicago, Ill.
October 9, 2006
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The Brooklyn fivesome, one of the up-and-coming bands du jour, brought its genre-ignoring, convention-damning, faith-in-music-reviving sound to the Metro in a blistering set that grew like an exponential curve: dense and slower at the beginning and increasingly more intense and fast-paced until the stage was nuttier than the crowd.
Sadly, this wasn't too difficult; hipster paralysis was everywhere. If you went to that show and your arms never left your side, don't bother attending another concert because if TV on the Radio can't get you going, nothing short of a PCP bender will.
The band members didn't seem to mind. Singer Tunde Adebimpe, guitarists Kyp Malone and Sitek, bassist Gerard Smith and drummer Jaleel Bunton always appeared to be enjoying themselves, a positive sign at any show.
Adebimpe by far was the most expressive, often shaking his head and grinning as if he couldn't believe what he was doing. He prowled the stage with presence, his left arm evoking more feeling than most of the crowd. He wasn't afraid to let loose with energy, pogoing like a piston on speed during the punk-rocker "The Wrong Way," and his wail-howl singing found the common ground between heartbreak and euphoria.
The rest of the group couldn't live up to that, but they didn't need to. Sitek often tore at his guitar with intensity that made you fear for his elbow ligaments. Malone was mostly content to let his complementary vocals and excellent guitar work do the talking.
The set was dominated by songs from the band's critically adored latest album, the curiously named, "Return to Cookie Mountain." The songs are dense and complex amalgams of sound, and it's not easy to like. You have to commit yourself to each song – if you hear TVOTR in passing, you're going to miss the intricacy and the power the band brings.
That power, though evident in the album, explodes when the band hits the stage, especially driven by Smith and Bunton's slaughtering rhythms.
A prime example of this was the band's throbbing rendition of "Staring at the Sun" – which Adebimpe jokingly introduced as a Paris Hilton cover. Normally a slow number, fuzzed over with feedback, Bunton revved up the drums and it was almost as if the Chemical Brothers were remixing it in real time.
To top that, the members of opener Grizzly Bear (otherwise hardly worth a mention), bounded onto the stage to join TVOTR in a chaotic closing rendition of "Let the Devil In," a song that already sounds like a backwoods field revival, and this version pretty much degenerated into a hedonistic tribal ritual, with everything out of place yet exactly where it was supposed to be.
Not unlike wind chimes on a guitar.
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