TV on the Radio @ the Wilbur Theater, Boston

October 17th, 2008 - by Bagley

Boston, Rock, Shows

“Love is Complicated,” TV on the Radio band member Kyp Malone told a sold-out crowd at the Wilbur Tuesday night.

Malone was talking about how outside of their concerts, Bostonians are assholes – but the band loves us anyway. Speaking as, I guess, one of the assholes, I should say our love is mutual, Kyp.

Honestly. With “Dear Science,” TVotR’s third sternum-thumping soul-shredding powerhouse album, still ringing in my ears, the Monday night concert felt less like a concert and more like a proposal.

I went into the concert eager for some kind, any kind, of release. I started listening to “Dear Science” Monday this week, and it very nearly brought me to tears. It’s that powerful. Seeing it live was even stronger.

Seeing most of the new album done live, with Malone and frontman Tunde Adebimpe pouring their everything into the tracks, with equal attention and life put into unstoppable barnburning favorites like “Wolf Like Me” and “Staring at the Sun,” brought you down – or up – to the band’s level.

The show was a communal effort, and wouldn’t have had nearly the mind-clearing power it had over me if the audience didn’t allow themselves to be taken away. There was the necessary hipster headbobbing, of course, off to the right of the balcony, but down on the ground, the throng snaked, thumped, pulsed like organs, muscles, blood.

It’s the band’s earnestness that does it. Only a few times did the band pause to address the audience, and each time, as with Malone’s frank admission that Bostonians are jerks but he loves us anyhow, the band was so frank, so direct. You take that next to the poetry — both aural and lyrical — coming out of the musicians, and the show became one big clearing of the air.

By the end of the show, we were all like Winston Smith. Whatever we had put up had been broken down, and the audience and the band moved as one. The show’s hypnosis peaked with “Wolf like Me,” when the band showed us what the howling was for.

Everybody was singing, jumping, shouting along, howling forever.