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**TV On The Radio - Seeds ★★★½**

There's something deeply unsettling about watching your heroes grow older, especially when they've spent the better part of a decade soundtracking the apocalypse with such beautiful precision. TV On The Radio's fifth studio album, "Seeds," arrives in 2014 as a band grappling with mortality, loss, and the strange burden of surviving your own artistic peak. It's their most vulnerable record, and paradoxically, their most conventional—a collection that finds Brooklyn's most adventurous art-rock outfit trading some of their experimental edge for hard-earned wisdom and surprisingly direct emotional appeals.

To understand "Seeds," you need to trace the trajectory from their breakthrough masterpiece "Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes" (2004) through their creative zenith "Return to Cookie Mountain" (2006), and finally to their most cohesive statement "Dear Science" (2008). Each album represented a quantum leap forward: the first established their singular blend of post-punk angularity, doo-wop harmonies, and electronic manipulation; the second perfected it with David Sitek's wall-of-sound production and guest appearances from Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O; and the third streamlined their chaos into something approaching conventional song structures without sacrificing their essential weirdness.

But between "Dear Science" and "Seeds" lies a chasm of personal tragedy and creative uncertainty. The death of beloved bassist Gerard Smith from lung cancer in 2011, just days after the release of their fourth album "Nine Types of Light," cast a long shadow over the remaining quartet. That album, while containing moments of beauty, felt like a band treading water, unsure of their identity without their rhythmic anchor. "Seeds" emerges from this period of grief as both eulogy and rebirth.

The album opens with "Quartz," a shimmering piece of crystalline beauty that immediately signals a more intimate approach. Tunde Adebimpe's vocals, always the band's secret weapon, float over Sitek's restrained production with newfound clarity. Gone are the layers of distortion and feedback that once made TVOTR sound like they were broadcasting from a burning building. Instead, we get space, breath, and surprisingly, hope.

"Happy Idiot" serves as the album's mission statement, a gorgeous meditation on willful ignorance that somehow manages to be both their most accessible song and one of their most lyrically complex. It's classic TVOTR—using pop sensibilities as a Trojan horse for deeper philosophical concerns. The track builds from Kyp Malone's gentle guitar arpeggios into a full-throated anthem, complete with handclaps and a chorus that burrows into your brain.

The album's emotional centerpiece, "Seeds," strips away nearly everything except Adebimpe's voice and a simple piano melody. It's devastating in its simplicity, a father's letter to his unborn child that doubles as the band's promise to continue despite overwhelming loss. When the full band finally crashes in during the song's final third, it feels like a cathartic release, a musical representation of hope triumphing over despair.

"Lazerray" brings back some of their experimental tendencies, with Sitek's production creating a sonic landscape that feels both futuristic and ancient. It's the closest "Seeds" comes to recapturing the controlled chaos of their earlier work, and it serves as a reminder of just how unique this band's sound remains in an increasingly homogenized musical landscape.

The album isn't without its missteps. "Right Now" feels overly familiar, recycling ideas from their stronger material without adding new insights. And while the production throughout is immaculate, there are moments where you long for the beautiful mess that made albums like "Return to Cookie Mountain" so thrilling.

But these are minor quibbles with an album that succeeds on its own terms. "Seeds" isn't trying to recapture past glories or push boundaries for their own sake. Instead, it's a mature work by a band that has learned to channel their grief into something approaching transcendence. It lacks the revolutionary fervor of their early work, but it gains something equally valuable: the wisdom that comes from surviving your own mythology.

In the context of TVOTR's catalog, "Seeds" feels like the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. It's their most human album, and while it may not inspire the same obsessive devotion as their early trilogy, it reveals new depths with each listen. Sometimes growing older means learning when