Family Tree

TV on the Radio’s Dear Science is an album of dense, maximalist art-rock, and “Family Tree” is its quiet middle — a five-and-a-half-minute song built around pizzicato strings and Tunde Adebimpe’s voice, about a family that cannot be built because of forces beyond the couple in question.

The strings carry the song. They swell and retreat. Adebimpe holds his voice at a careful restraint, and the arrangement opens up just enough in the final minute to feel like the scene changing. It’s music that makes the ordinary errand — the walk, the errand, the coffee — feel like a moment that knows something about itself. Listen close.