Latest news with #DavidSitek
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Skunk Anansie: The Painful Truth review – a raw triumph of reinvention and resilience
Almost 30 years after Weak gave the London band a global smash, Skunk Anansie's 'painful truth' is facing up to middle age, parenthood, the loss of a longstanding manager, fears that their best days were behind them and two members being diagnosed with cancer. Recorded with drummer Mark Richardson in recovery and bassist Cass undergoing chemotherapy, their first album in nine years confronts such issues with candour and defiance. Opener An Artist Is an Artist stridently lays down the manifesto: over an infectious collision of electro-pop and post-punk, singer Skin insists that a true creative will not be denied by ageing or menopause. The vocalist subsequently addresses challenges ranging from the hedonistic rock lifestyle to her own family history. Musically, producer David Sitek of TV on the Radio has urged them to throw off the shackles of their 90s rock sound and be unafraid to go wherever experimentation takes them. Songs hurtle through electronic rock, ska, dub and even tinkling pianos as moods shift from urgent to ethereal. Singer Skin digs deep into her personal well for Shame ('I got the love from my mother, the pain from my dad'), but allows a moment of euphoria on the catchy My Greatest Moment. The album's sense of emotional investment and creative rejuvenation reaches a sublime apex with the closing track, Meltdown. Skin's delicate vocals give the song about a lonely breakdown a raw, disarming beauty.
Wall Street Journal
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Thee Black Boltz' by Tunde Adebimpe Review: A Solo Record's Homemade Sound
For the first decade of this century, the New York rock scene was defined by a cluster of talented bands—the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem—borrowing elements from underground movements of the past and making them their own. Part of the fun of experiencing these acts in their earliest days was the legibility of their references, from Joy Division to Television. TV on the Radio, an art-rock outfit founded by singer Tunde Adebimpe and multi-instrumentalist David Sitek in Brooklyn in 2001, was a little harder to figure out, which became part of its allure. As it added members and built a following leading up to its 2004 debut, 'Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes,' and its 2006 breakthrough, 'Return to Cookie Mountain,' the group became increasingly hard to pigeonhole, and it wasn't just because of its musical influences. TV on the Radio was a mostly black band in a mostly white scene, and wrote elliptical songs that sometimes touched on politics—its members seemed more serious, and also more musically ambitious, than their peers. After 2014's 'Seeds,' the project went on an extended hiatus, though the past year has seen a buzz of activity, including a tour. There's no word yet of a new record, so for now Mr. Adebimpe's debut solo LP, 'Thee Black Boltz' (Sub Pop), out Friday, will have to tide fans over.
