Firstly, this is not Dave Sitek and friends, nor is it a band created around the somewhat considerable talent of aforementioned Sitek, nor is it a five out of five album which every reviewer has felt compelled to lavish upon it.

This Brooklyn five piece has slowly built up a reputation for being one of the best bands on the planet, this is their third proper album (let’s not include the bizarre electronica noodlings of ‘OK Calculator’) is the album which takes them out of the underground into a genuine chart bothering concern. The rough edges which made them so charmingly original on 2004’s debut ‘Desperate youth and blood thirsty babes’ and 2006’s ‘Return to Cookie mountain’ (the best album of this decade bar none) have been ironed out and where there was once grime, there now is a pop sheen, in parts, it’s astounding, others, confusing, some, pointless but still infinitely more vital than 99% of bands out there.

‘Halfway Home’ is classic TVOTR and a fantastic way to start. Throbbing basslines collide with layers and layers of percussion from handclaps to extra techno influenced beats with lashings of guitar and synths clashing intensely and smothered with a perfectly angsty vocal from lead vocalist Tunde Adyimpe .

‘Stork and Owl’ is a fragile Bowie-esque ballad which uses vocal samples as percussion over sorrowful strings which fizzes with the imagination synonymous with the band whilst the luscious ‘Family Tree’ is a string led showstopper filled with so much warmth you could be mistaken for sitting in front of a log fire drinking hot chocolate…in Doncaster.

The more introspective moments are the ones which shine the brightest; the sorrowful ‘Love Dog’ has all the ingredients you expect from them, jittering beats, gorgeous Brian Wilson infused vocals and endless unexpected noises from Siteks’ bag of tricks. The finest on offer here is ‘Shout Me Out’ which uses their favoured trick of throwing every sound, every genre they could possibly delve into, throw them all against a wall and see what sticks. Guitar work you’d expect on the soundtrack to ‘Pulp Fiction’ and swaggering electronic beats quickly subside into a furious melange of drum n bass played live and dirty finger nailed slashes of guitars, it is genuinely jawdropping.

For the first time you can hear filler on their albums and there’s too much of it, despite this filler being better than the output of the majority of bands out there, you still don’t expect there to be gaps in between the opportunities to marvel at their ease with brilliance. Lead single ‘Golden Age’ has them parodying themselves badly with it’s uplifting choruses and liberal brass usage, it couldn’t even be described as a throwaway b-side as their b-sides tend to be just as good as the a’s while the funky nothings of ‘Red Dress’ are so anonymous that even a hundred listens would fail for it to sink in. Worst up is ‘Crying’ which is straight out R ‘n’ B flavoured Pop which fuses Prince with Andre 3000 but fails to come anywhere near either (so that’s Lenny Kravitz, right?) while ‘Dancing Choose’ is a bizarre hybrid of electro and rock with a vocal from Adeyimpe which updates Michael Stipe on ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’, it comes close to working , but not close enough. Still, with TV on The Radio around, there really is no need to persist with the majority of gubbins this country is currently producing is there?

Chris Todd