December 01, 2008
Top Ten of the Year 2008
Restiform Bodies - TV Loves You Back CD (Anticon)
If hip-hop is redundant in 2008, doesn’t that make post-rap beyond redundant? Honestly, there are dozens of reasons to hate TV Loves You Back: the over-convoluted rhyming; the “ironic” '80s pop sounds; the token splashes of smarty-pants electronica; the lapses into dumb-as-fuck puerility; the unforgivable misogyny; the constant harping on about the evils of mass-media consumerism; the "zany" photo shoots...
And yet I keep coming back to it. How could something so hard to like be so hard not to love? More than likely, it's just a beautiful mystery but if I had to hypothesize a couple of scientific explanations, I'd go with: (a) complicity and (b) realization.
Complicity, then. The fact that TV Loves You Back constitutes an unrelenting 45-minute attack on the corrosive influence of TV and consumer culture could - and to some extent does - make it bit of a wearing listen. The thing that makes it bearable is that it's a story told from the outside moving in. Structured as a true concept album, it starts with third-person hectoring and moves inexorably towards first-person despair. The impression one is left with is that Restiform Bodies genuinely love TV - it's themselves they can't stand. I couldn't disagree more with the PopMatters review of this album - there's no distance here; no judgement. There's complicity.
Then, realization. Restiform Bodies have been waaayyy off the radar for years, so they've had plenty of time to craft a tight set of songs. And holy crap have they ever succeeded! The lyrics are incredibly dense with horrifically vivid imagery, the tunes are insanely catchy and the songs are all ingenious multi-part constructions. Nothing is meaningless here and nothing is left to chance. "Opulent Soul" is the Song of the Year and "Interactive Halloween Bear" isn't far behind.
In fact, this might have been in the running for Album of the Year if it wasn't for all that stuff that I just can't forgive - not least the icky (ironic?) misogyny of "A Pimp-Like God". If these guys could stop thinking with their dicks, they'd probably take over the world.
—Samuel Macklin
Source: The Blogglebum Cage
