Anna Webber – Los Angeles Photographer

TV on the Radio @ The Ventura Theater – Thursday April 16

Even though the Ventura Theater is located about an hour short of both L.A. and Santa Barbara, the crowd filled it in for TV on the Radio’s high-octane set Thursday. Three black guys and four white guys comprise the band whose sound is a detailed mix between afro-beat breakdown, funk delicacies, flattening punk rock, and electro-synth reverberations. They put on (with no pun intended) an intrinsically colorful show that slung the crowd through rainbows and gouged them from doldrums with decadent neon textures. Not really anyone wasn’t dancing and sweating, and I’d say it might have been the first time leaving the photo pit actually carrying the scent of the band’s body odor – even Damian Marley’s tour bus left me unscathed in that area. Frontman Tunde Adebimpe danced like a fish out of water while Kyp Malone (vocals, guitar, loops) killed it with a voice sometimes reaching frequencies of Al Green heights, possibly even upwards, but with less gospel gradation. The most crowd response came from songs like Wolf Like Me and Staring at the Sun, and the die-hards hardly missed a word dead on. The Ventura show was the second of 2 shows surrounding L.A. county before they hit the Coachella mainstage Saturday, which they also dominated.

TV on the Radio - Tunde Adebimpe (photo: Anna Webber)

TV on the Radio - Tunde Adebimpe (photo: Anna Webber)

TV on the Radio - Kyp Malone (photo: Anna Webber)