Art-rockers show some new moves

Dear Science,

the third album by the Brooklyn rock quintet TV on the Radio, is the sound of a boldly experimental band making its most exciting music to date.

It's what happens when a brazen art-rock band outdoes itself with a cohesive collection of songs that eye a world that appears to be falling apart with a watchful sense of dread, while making room for catchy choruses and unmistakable optimism.

And while it doesn't dispense with the multilayered soundscapes of 2006's excellent and often-abrasive Return to Cookie Mountain, it adds a dash of funk to the noise-rock and deranged doo-wop, and comes out sounding like a dance record, or at least a dance record that an experimental art-rock band like TV on the Radio would make.

"It's the closest thing to it," says Tunde Adebimpe, the band's bespectacled vocalist, who shares songwriting duties with the bearded guitarist Kyp Malone. They'll perform with their band mates - guitarist David Andrew Sitek, bassist Gerard Smith and drummer Jaleel Bunton - at the Electric Factory tomorrow. "This time, we set out to make music that was evocative of something we would move to."

"With this record," Sitek, who produced Dear Science, told Rolling Stone, "we faded out the question mark and faded in the exclamation point."

Dear Science is not short on anxiety or anger. There's a lovely Adebimpe ballad called "Family Tree" that deftly mingles images of romance and racism. And the singer's howling "Red Dress" shouts out against the war in Iraq but also points a finger of disappointment inward: "I'm not living a life worth dying for."

"But on this record, even the songs that aren't the happiest are tempered with music that's a little more buoyant," says Adebimpe, who's also an actor - he's the fiance of the title character played by Rosemarie DeWitt in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, which will open in Philadelphia on Oct. 17.

Adebimpe, who directed the video for the song "Pin," by his Brooklyn friends the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, is also a visual artist whose skills at stop-action animation once landed him a job on MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch.

"I'm not the kind of person who writes a story where everything's getting terrible and you get into a car, and you're driving in the dark down the road and it gets more and more narrow, and then you stop and there's a guy in a car behind and he gets out and shoots you, and . . . 'The End,' '' says Adebimpe, 33, doing his best to keep from snickering as he tells the tale.

Instead, Adebimpe, who was born in Nigeria to a psychiatrist father and pharmacist mother, but spent most of his childhood in Pittsburgh, is a more optimistic sort.

"I'm the kind of guy," he says by phone from his home in Brooklyn, "who writes a song where you go into a dark wood, and you get out of the car and you get on a path that takes you out of the woods, and you make it. It never dead-ends."

For Adebimpe, who graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, TV on the Radio began after he had moved on from his post-college job at MTV, where he worked on creating puppet likenesses of Martin Scorsese to square off against Steven Spielberg, and representations of the Beastie Boys to do battle with the Backstreet Boys.

He was living in a group loft in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn when Sitek, who, like Adebimpe, is a painter, moved in. Adebimpe had no interest in being in a band. "I can't think of a more useless position than 'rock singer,' " says the vocalist, who, when he puts those words together, can't help but think of Whitesnake's leather-pantsed, hair-metal sex-god, David Coverdale. "I'm more interested in the kind of guy who's singing by default."

Still, Sitek had brought a lot of recording equipment with him to the loft, and the pair found themselves creating audio as well as visual art. "It felt like an extension of us painting," says Adebimpe. "It was basically us tripping each other out, and being inspired. It's like when you have a bunch of people sitting around with their sketchbooks. Everything you do is suddenly better because you want to show the person next to you. 'Oh, check it out!'

"Also," he adds, "it was after Sept. 11. And the amount of time we put into going out and looking for jobs had dwindled to nothing. So it was: Let's just stay here and make stuff. That was absolutely our philosophy: 'I don't see the point in doing anything else besides this right now.' "

After Adebimpe and Sitek recorded a Radiohead-inspired demo called OK Calculator, Malone joined and became TVOTR's third creative hub. The band released its Young Liars EP in 2003 and debut album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, in 2004.

That album, which starts off with Adebimpe's blinding "Staring at the Sun," turned the band into instant critics' darlings, and the arty point on a new New York rock triangle, along with the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It also earned the band the seal of approval from David Bowie, who sang backup vocals on "Province," on Cookie Mountain, in 2006.

After the Cookie Mountain tour ended in 2006, Adebimpe, who also starred in the 2001 indie-romance film Jump Tomorrow, read Jenny Lumet's script for Rachel Getting Married. When he met Demme, he says, "I was like Chris Farley in that [Saturday Night Live] skit with Paul McCartney, where he can't really hold it together. That was me."

Still, he got the part. The shoot was intense. "You start to feel really uncomfortable because the camera is like another character, eavesdropping on this really intense family situation." He says he wants "to keep this compulsion for doing things in other mediums going," which he calls "my disorder. I feel like if I was only doing one thing, it wouldn't be as good."

In a 2007 interview at a European rock festival that can be seen on YouTube, Adebimpe talks about pop music's bad habit of underestimating the intelligence of its audience. The members of TV on the Radio, by contrast, make music that, first and foremost, seeks to challenge the other members of TV on the Radio.

"I don't know who I would pander to," Adebimpe says over the phone. "I wouldn't underestimate Kyp's intelligence, just like I wouldn't underestimate Dave's or Gerard's or Jaleel's. I would want to give them the best thing I could give them."

And not the easiest thing, either. " 'Cause sometimes the thing that is true is not so push-button. You're making it for other people you respect, and by extension, anyone who wants to listen." He laughs. "We're not making music so impenetrable that only we can understand it."

At 8:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Electric Factory, 421 N. Seventh St. Information: www.livenation.com, 215-627-1332.