If their debut album, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, was an impressive beginning, Brooklyn group TV on the Radio’s second effort is the full blown brilliance of the band coming to the fore. Return to Cookie Mountain is easily one of the most impressive albums of 2006.

Thick as molasses, Dave Sitek crafts spells with sounds; from the opening “I Was a Lover” onwards, Return to Cookie Mountain is a wild journey through vaguely socio-political barbs, wicked rhythms, and a sense of genuine adventure. What other band could come with a hook as insidious as that which runs through single “Wolf Like Me” and also deliver a beautiful paean as grimy yet elegant as album closer “Wash the Day Away”?

Elsewhere “Playhouse” is mad drums and “Province” is piano clunks, as vocalists Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone trade ‘woo-ooh’s towards the end. The thing that makes TV on the Radio so special throughout Return to Cookie Mountain is the way they bring together elements of sound that shouldn’t work but do – there’s elements of doo-wop together with post-punk funk, as on “A Method” or “Dirtywhirl”. But it’s never stylistic, as Sitek tempers everything with a sense of urgency and frailty – it feels like it could collapse at any moment, but it never does.

TV on the Radio are doing things by their own rules, and are all the more exciting for it. The trick is that they have balance; Return to Cookie Mountain is structured as such that, yes, it is an artistic release, but at its heart beat a mighty fine collection of songs. So where their debut was full of ideas, it now seems entirely unfocussed when compared with this follow-up which, to be honest, blows it out of the park in terms of sheer delivery.