Turn it up – TV on the Radio – “Will Do” (Interscope/4AD)
A lot is happening for Brooklyn’s TV on the Radio. Two of the members released solo albums in the last two years. Vocalist Tunde Adebimpe launched his acting career alongside Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married. And just recently, the quintet emerged from a year-long hiatus after releasing and touring behind the universally acclaimed Dear Science with a brand new album, Nine Types of Light.
Touring behind the new release, the band is about to embark on a U.S. tour, which will be missing bassist Gerard Smith. Tuesday, the band released a statement stating that upon completion of Nine Types of Light, Smith was diagnosed with lung cancer.
But with all of this buzz and drama around the band, you might not take their latest single at face value. “Will Do,” the leading single off of their newest album is the best track to come out this year. The song is a bass-driven sleeper; it is a slow-paced head-bobber that lets its hooks, melodies and chord changes do the work.
“Will do” makes it is easy to see why producer Dave Sitek, who’s worked with the likes of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Foals and Scarlett Johansson is in demand right now. On “Will Do,” Sitek takes a smart, bare bones song and decorates it with toy-pianos, eerie samples and sparse, disjointed guitars to leave the listener with a hooky, beautiful, triumph of a song. And it will be stuck in your head for days after first listen.
Turn it down – Katy Perry feat. Kanye West – “E.T.” (Capitol)
The best part about Katy Perry’s new single has nothing to do with her. The two verses Kanye West added to the song “E.T.” were good enough to pull it out of the gutter – but weren’t good enough to make it good. The song is pretty much a straight take on the Teenage Dream cut, but now it’s re-vamped, sped up and has a few verses by West tacked on.
The song, before West’s additions, really features nothing Perry’s fans might come to expect or hope for. It is a run-of-the-mill pop song apparently about being in love with someone so unique, it’s like the person’s an alien — the alien metaphor is sort of new for pop-music, the “you’re so unique to me, baby” idea isn’t. The song doesn’t showcase Perry’s great voice at all, which has become more prevalent in her more recent work, and the quirkiness seen in songs like “I Kissed a Girl” and “Ur So Gay” is completely gone.
Instead, the audience gets a single that is going to be played to death on the radio, especially now Capitol has dropped some serious money to feature West to make the otherwise-boring song marketable. And, hate to break it to you Capitol, but while Kanye’s verses sound good on their own, they’re really doing nothing to help out Perry.
