TV Movie

Opening with a mix of sci-fi synth noise and Jarvis’ campfire acoustic guitar, “TV Movie” emerges as the least adorned song on This Is Hardcore. The band still can’t quite resist adding plenty of production candy gloss along the way, although Nick Banks’ drums have a naturalistic sound lacking on the rest of the album. The opening verse finds Jarvis laboring a tad too hard to reach his punch line in comparing his life to made-for-the-small-screen dross. But it’s worth it for the song’s climax, where the string section swells, and his voice hits that ache in his upper register, as he makes every effort to finally do away with any semblance of cleverness, to state his loneliness as simply and directly as possible.