Sounding more and more like a 20-years-later Tom Petty, Tokyo Police Club return with second track, "Hot Tonight" from third album, Forcefield. "Hot Tonight" is a wide-open hi-fi jam, something that sounds a lot like the last Noah and the Whale record biting into a surge protector. And maybe the guitars are too treble, and maybe, in some sense, the pop isn't quite poppy enough for Heavy Rotation, but few bands in independent rock circles make songs with such ambition and singable hooks. TPC, on the verge of being a radio band, may well read back like a union of the Cars and Petty in twenty years time, purveyors of big, catchy jams for open roads, downtown nights and any other cliche that springs to mind.
This review runs live, first and in color on the Bowery Presents' House List blog. Photo via.
The indie-rock universe has taken on an especially mercurial quality when the guys in Tokyo Police Club, the veritable old guard, find themselves headlining a sold-out Bowery Ballroom show just one night before warming up for Foster the People in Central Park. But this was the landscape outside, the fickle cultural one—the very same one that in 2006 elevated TPC from obscure basement band to playing Mercury Lounge to signing with Saddle Creek and beyond. Inside, the band was back playing a New York City rock club, a bit of nostalgia for a well-established group that in some respects had transcended spaces like this one.
As their new record steadily creeps toward the finish line, this was Tokyo Police Club’s first show “in a long time,” according to singer Graham Wright. So, suitably, they opened with something new. The song, one of the few the audience knew none of the words to, featured the signature lyric “Don’t look back,” a winking self-admonishment from a band ripping between its past and its future. Diving to 2006, they followed with “Nature of the Experiment,” the type of song that makes you remember where you were when you first heard it. The set oscillated among old, recent and new, featuring “Favorite Colour,”“Tessellate” and a new song with the words “I want to travel to the future” lodged prominently in its chorus.
The band finished the set with the twosome of “Breakneck Speed,” one of the best songs of 2010, and “Wait Up (Boots of Danger),” the first bringing the house to its fullest voice on the lyric “It’s good to be back, good to be back” before an explosion of high-fret guitar and keyboard. It was, perhaps, this tension between returning and moving forward, the old becoming new and the new becoming familiar, that stuck the set together, a sort of past and future tense architecture. And so it was no joke when the band encored with a cover of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and then closed with their second-ever single, “Cheer It On.” Only a few people knew the words then but everyone knew them now, bringing the evening both back and full circle.
If Tokyo Police Club took their signing bonus from Saddle Creek in 2006 and moved to Scotland with the intention of playing nothing but surf-rock and post-punk, they might have become Tango In The Attic and written their glittering and awesomely shabby single, "Mona Lisa Overdrive". It is washed out, angular guitar pop with the same vaguely confessional vocals that sound like something broadcast through wax microphones and tin can telephones. Vibration is the operating principle as the song crashes to its conclusion, at once full of unrealized potential and enough seemingly unintentional hooks to stick in the consciousness and remain lodged there. It is the same kind of shabbiness and energy that made "Nature Of The Experiment" function in 2006. "We're halfway up the bracket," you remember the first couplet of the second verse from six years ago, before mouthing, "the rain comes through my jacket", another in a long list of things that are instantly memorable whether they mean to be or not: "Mona Lisa Overdrive".
This review runs live and in color with amazing photos (not by us) on Bowery's House List.
The theme music from The Empire Strikes Back echoed out toward the enormous disco ball hanging over what seemed like an especially sold-out Terminal 5. The lights cut out and the house music became applause as Tokyo Police Club took the stage in a stride combining sheepishness and magnanimity. Their introduction was no mistake; owing to a competition with coheadliner Two Door Cinema Club to see which band could have the more bizarre house music played before their set. This particular song was perfect since a different and more ebullient empire, Tokyo Police Club, was making a triumphant return of its own.
The band mixed recent material and older songs with aplomb, revealing how far they’ve come and how little they’ve changed. Tokyo Police Club opened with “Favourite Food,” off 2010’s Champ, followed by the spasmodic “Nature of the Experiment,” from their debut EP. Mixing in material from Elephant Shell, TPC played “Graves,” “In a Cave” and a shuddering version of “Tessellate,” with the crowd clapping in perfect time throughout the verses.
The show was about marking milestones as much as it was about reviewing the jet trail of a band in liftoff. After playing recent single “Breakneck Speed,” featuring the central lyric “It’s good to be back,” frontman Dave Monks looked into the balconies and screamed, “This is for anyone who was at Mercury Lounge in 2006,” before playing the clapping “Citizens of Tomorrow” with its winking reference to the future of “2009.” Monks got it: He and his band were the heirs to some throne and they were now sitting on it. For the encore, they brought Two Door Cinema Club onstage to join them in covering the Strokes’ “Last Nite,” a song without which neither band would have been standing in front of 3,000 rock kids in New York City. It was good to be back. It was good to be here.
It was a comparatively laid back song from a frenetic band that dominated the spring and summer of 2010. For a record that began with ambient beeps, Tokyo Police Club'sChamp had its first single sitting tight in the three hole waiting to stumble out with shabby guitars and slurring lyrics exploding into a sea of hi-fi guitars. These dynamic shifts proved to be the genius of "Breakneck Speed," especially with its driving metaphor, motif and lyric, "It's good to be back/good to be back," opening at the 1.12 mark and defining the emotional character of a band releasing their first record since 2007. It was one of those fist-swinging, life-affirming, shout-along moments, "It's good to be back". You couldn't sing it loud enough.
"Norway" made you a little seasick if you listened to it closely enough. The tonal quality of the keyboards warped up and down in pitch only slightly, but it was more than enough for the listener to feel a mild disquiet, take a deep breath and try to focus on the horizon. This was the sound of unsettling. However, Beach House on "Norway", like the rest of Teen Dream, was comfortable in their treatment of troubling themes because the melodies behind these cold medicine keyboards were simple, beautiful pop. Even "Norway," for its challenging verses, is breathless, pulsing and remarkably singable in the chorus. This does not even account for the bridge - and surely, no one wrote better bridges in 2010 than Beach House - and the way it frames the final chorus, a sea of twirling vocals lifting Victoria Legrand up as she moans into the storm. It was enough to just breath it in.
The drums announced their return, and in the case of "Bloodbuzz Ohio," the drums did not equivocate the return of the Kings of Indie Rock in 2010, The National. Like a fighter running combinations, the band open "Bloodbuzz" with rapid fire percussion before laying over a steady piano progression, finding in this combination a strange and less stable cousin to "Fake Empire." Berninger fires his lazy wisdom in his head-spinning trip back to the band's roots in Ohio, reflecting both on his impermanence there, "Ohio don't remember me," and the current economic status quo, "The floors are falling out from everybody I know." But there is surprise affection in this return as Berninger muses with regret, "I never thought about love when I thought about home." The power of this nostos carried the National through a tour de force album, a return in its own right to the frustrated brilliance of Alligator, proving that which was left in the dark, behind and forgotten, is not just fuel for reflection, but what moves us onward.
2. Arcade Fire - "We Used To Wait"
One of the most moving songs of the year was about standing still. Win Butler and Arcade Fire crafted the fantastically tense, "We Used To Wait" to address exactly this disjoint. Butler too, along with many of his contemporaries, stares into his personal history with a mixture of fascination and horror. It is his delicacy in handling the source material that sets both song and record apart. Bulter's curiosity is evident, though not particularly judgemental, as he sifts through seemingly bland vignettes of his youth, like the romantic sloth of postal delivery. There aren't easy answers here, suburbia cast equally as terrifying and beautiful. In fact, Butler's complex and divided feelings about his own upbringing, the ability to find richness in superficial American experience, are the soul of The Suburbs and the emotional core of "We Used To Wait." The record's unsettling cover art revealed the key. We are poised behind a car in the driveway of the subdivided neighborhood of Butler's youth. The only glimpse of ourselves will be in the rear view mirror as we move forward (and backward) to explore what is in front of us and what is left inside.
If there was a bill in New York not to miss, it was this one. Kicking off at 8.30 with Antlers taking the stage in front of a nearly empty Music Hall of Williamsburg and closing with Tokyo Police Club hitting the stage at nearly 1.30 in the morning, this show didn't quit and it didn't miss.
Antlers took the stage and opened with an ambient progression of fuzz and held-keys. It was a quiet way to grab a crowd but this is a band that wrote an album about terminal illness. Were you expecting chimes and G, C, D progressions? The band is a little precious at times. Their lead-singer over-does it with his falsetto and the band is a little too in-love with being serious. "Two" was pumped up live, trading it's tragic reverence for double-tap drums and a pace the band rarely approaches in other tunes. Leaving the stage someone leaned over and said, "I liked that." He would later admit it wasn't that good. This sort of sums it up.
Dawes offered an inoffensive, if well-manicured, set of southern-rock. Roots rock doesn't always rub New York the right way but on this night the crowd bought in, stayed upstairs and sang along. Surely, this band has a secret collection of Neil Young records they listen to late at night. The songs are smooth and the band is tight. That doesn't mean it blew the doors off. But it does count for something.
The night turns during Deer Tick's set. From my native Rhode Island, the band brought the state flag on stage. The word emblazoned on it was unmistakable: "hope." But by the end of the set it very well could have said, "dance." Deer Tick, a throwback four-piece, are equal parts 1950s rock and 2009 folk. That's meant as a compliment. Using stand-up bass and tight-as-a-drum three-part harmony, the band got the crowd shuffling around. The lead-singer's voice is as harsh as it is cathartic - full of pain and pathos.
With considerable pressure, Pela took the stage announcing themselves as "The Pelas." It was a joke from their frontman, who looks like he could have played linebacker in college. The guy is an absolute train of human mass and energy. It's a wonder this band isn't huge. They are everything good about The National with none of the self-flagellation. With a clear desire to kill the crowd, Pela busts around the stage with little regard for their own equipment or personal safety (this is a band that canceled a tour after one member fell on broken glass and suffered a massive wound). The moment of the night comes in the band's second-to-last song: frontman, lit from the back, sweating furiously, with a rapidly burning cigarette in his mouth. The smoke pours from his mouth as the band thrash through "Tenement Teeth." It's after midnight in Williamsburg and you can be sure that this is everything your parents warned you about. Smoking, bars, loud music, personal injury, rock music - but Pela is the best band in the world in this moment, thrashing, moving and in control. There's nothing dangerous about passion, the pitfalls are at the periphery.
And Tokyo Police Club, well, it was 1.30 and after Pela the night was over for me anyways. I heard later that the set was good. For the best bill of the year, it almost didn't need a headliner.
Tokyo Police Club took the stage last night at the Mercury Lounge and it was anything but a secret. The show, billed as Mark Knight's Tropic Zone, was Bowery Presents' foray into the world of unannounced, big name gigs. Unfortunately, it was such a secret in the weeks leading up to the show, speculation got out of control. TV On The Radio? Nope. Wolf Parade? All your secrets were drowned. No other bands, just Tokyo Police Club back at the Mercury Lounge for the first time in 18 months.
And everybody did their job. TPC owed Bowery Presents a show, accounting for a Webster Hall gig they backed out of a few months ago. You traded me for the lump sum. Bowery Presents slung together the secret gig, and TPC agreed. Everyone was fairly polite - it was more business deal than desire to connect with people. It was more of a transaction than a secret.
The band took the stage just before 11:15pm and the room was just a little under full. Tokyo Police Club always come out a little flat. The word on the street is you got a weakness. It seems like they're surprised to be there or a little too grateful - they just never come out and kill it. By now they have a catalogue deep enough to come out a little weak and rely on their bigger songs to close the set. This is not a total disaster.
Despite some equipment malfunctions, this is a radically different band than you might remember. After fiddling with their bass amp, the lead-singer jokes, "We're professionals." You've got nerve but we've got tact. It's not a joke. They've got a fancy guitar effect on all the songs from Elephant Shell and the guitarist has to look over at the guitar tech to make sure everything is opperating. It makes the new material sound, bluntly, huge. They've managed to embrace all the stage flourish of a big touring band. Their light-tech is working hard and the stage lights suddenly go out after almost every song. This band might work best in a small room but they aren't a small band anymore. Not even a little.
The show ends up being unexpectedly intimate. They play a down-tempo version of "Juno," seemingly inspired by the Ra Ra Riot remix of the song that dropped last week. There's a positively anthemic version of the slower-ride, "Listen To The Math." There are technical problems to the point where the keyboardist does about 60 seconds of filler about the first time they played the Mercury Lounge. It almost feels like you're seeing one of the biggest rock bands of the year play in someones basement. You're my cave and I've been hiding out. It's disjunctive but it works. They're not really trying to blow anyone away (and they don't) but they're trying to show up and put on a good show (and they do).
For a show that got scheduled because of a contract dispute, it ended up being more agreeable than not. We all signed on the bottom of the waiver and came out on a Sunday night. It was late and they band played nearly their entire catalogue. It was an invisible hand shake. We didn't need an opener. It's good enough that you're here. And it's better that you've come alone.
