TV on the Radio bassist Gerard Smith died Wednesday of lung cancer, the band announced on its Web site.

“We will miss him terribly,” the band said, and announced the cancellation of five shows, including Friday’s scheduled appearance at Metro. Also canceled were shows Wednesday in Detroit, Saturday and Sunday in Minneapolis, and Tuesday in Denver.

Smith had not been touring with the band in recent weeks. He was diagnosed with lung cancer after the band completed its latest album, “Nine Types of Light.” He  joined the band in 2005 and played on their albums "Return to Cookie Mountain" (2006) and  "Dear Science" (2008), contributing guitars, keyboards and backing vocals in addition to bass.

greg@gregkot.com

3.5 stars (out of 4)

TV on the Radio’s ability to pull anthems out of chaos and find the dance pulse in a junkyard of noise was well-established on its three previous studio albums. On “Nine Types of Light” (Interscope), the quintet raises a more intimate ruckus. If their past was about creating a disruptive, disorienting soundtrack for a world in crisis, the new album is an invitation to “shift your known position to the light.”

The tone is set by the opener, “Second Song,” which tries to block out all the distractions (“appetites and impulses confuse me”) and focus on what matters: the person with whom you share a life. Throughout the album, the search for purpose, meaning, solace, ends in the arms of a lover. The landscape beneath the vocals shifts from conversationally intimate keyboard to jittery guitar and then sashaying horns, like a movie mirroring what’s going on in the narrator’s mind.

The vocals of Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, alternately ecstatic and confiding, plot the band’s journey. “Keep Your Heart” shifts from falsetto cries to near-whispered weariness and a simple vow of devotion even as “the world falls apart.”
 
Hard-won beauty and ballads dominate, though there are exceptions, reminders of the harsh world outside the bedroom: the agitated “Repetition,” the dinner-party-from-hell in “Forgotten.” But even one of the more strident tracks, “Caffeinated Consciousness,” celebrates “optimistic overload.”

Though this is TV on the Radio at its most melodic and accessible, the music never succumbs to formula. Guitars scratch to the surface then recede, alien keyboards loom and then dissipate, strings add stately beauty even as horns wail like R&B sirens. Overlapping rhythms push things onto the dancefloor, then drop out like a trapdoor beneath the dancers’ feet. In much the same way “Nine Types of Light” reminds us to savor our most precious, intimate moments, because they can disappear in an instant.

greg@gregkot.com