TV on the Radio

Maybe I will be proven wrong but I am fairly convinced that "Return to Cookie Mountain" by TV on the Radio will be topping most of the end of the year Best Album polls. Why? It is a very good album, indeed, but what sets it apart from other very good albums this year so far is that it sounds contemporary in the context of American popular music. It is an hybrid album which owes as much to hip-hop as to post-punk. It surely incorporates many different influences from both sides but somehow they manage to blend into something unique. No matter how the boundaries between what is black and what is white popular music have blurred over the years, I can't recall a moment an American band have shook those boundaries so much as TOTR do on "Cookie Mountain". And that's new. Even David Bowie's guest appearance on "Province" is as surprising as totally effective. It makes sense. Wasn't Bowie rock's illustrous chameleon whose flirtation with styles shifted from Philadelphia to Berlin in a couple of years in the 1970s?
Mainstream rock critics mostly value an album which is as significant culturally as musically and therefore I'm betting they will align with "Cookie Mountain" - unless the powerful Dylan lobby goes out of proportion!

You can see TOTR in action here.