I take back everything bad I ever said about TV on the Radio, which was very little anyway. My first exposure to them was their 2006 release Return to Cookie Mountain. I kept trying to like it, but could never get past the feeling that I was listening to a lost mid-seventies Peter Gabriel solo album, and the slightly off-key falsetto vocals throughout the recording would make me cringe a bit at times. I always imagined they would be fantastic live, but never really fell in love with the material. Their 2008 release Dear Science has changed all that. In spite of the fact that the first two tunes almost always leave me on the verge of tears, I’ve been playing it daily for about a week now. The vocals have all seemed to find their place, the production is polished but not to the point of being annoyingly slick, and the lyrics…man. I wish I had written the words to “Halfway Home”, for instance. Well-metered moody pop ambiguity at it’s best. And then they follow up with the almost sunny but somehow bittersweet “Crying”. Sorry, I’d say more, but I’m getting all weepy again. L.A. Record has an interesting interview with bassist Gerard Smith in which he touches on some interesting points about being a “person of color” while being perceived as “black” while playing “white music”. Just open your ears and stay color blind; this is an amazing release. The clip featured here is the video for “Golden Age”.