TPC once again tries to upend everything you’d expect from a Tokyo Police Club album…just like its predecessors
When Tokyo Police Club released their debut EP A Lesson in Crime in 2006, its jangly guitar riffs and constantly pounding basslines seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the mid-2000s. It was a sound that breathed new life into the foundation the Strokes laid at the beginning of the decade, riding the tail end of the great garage rock boom. However, this market crashed as the indie landfill emerged a few years later, and Tokyo Police Club had the unfortunate distinction of releasing their full-length debut Elephant Shell alongside the likes of The Kooks’ Konk.
Tokyo Police Club seemed to take this moment to heart, and have spent the past decade more or less reinventing themselves. Sophomore album Champ added a more electronic and technical sound to the mix in 2010, while 2014’s Forcefield saw the band take things into an entirely unexpected pop-rock direction. Most recently, the2016 release of the two-part EP Mellon Collie and the Infinite Radness appeared to solidify that Tokyo Police Club were more pop than garage rock, and it seemed reasonable to expect that their fourth studio album would be another release full of earworm hooks and slick production. Could the band’s reinvention spell finally be over?
TPC answers this with a resounding “no.” As guitarist Josh Hook said, “We chose to really challenge those years of built up preconceptions of who and what we are.” It’s an understandable sentiment, except for that fact that it could apply to almost any Tokyo Police Club album. As a result, TPC sounds like the product of a band in the midst of an identity crisis.
One of the most distinguishing aspects of TPC is the absence of synthesizer, which played such a prominent role in their last few releases. Without the angular synth effects of Champ or the bouncy pop they embraced a few years ago, Tokyo Police Club have moved towards a nebulous post-punk style that defies any firm categorization. In the band’s defense, this must be a freeing feeling, working untethered to expectations and genres. In practice, this means TPC is a mishmash of heavy and mild, new and old-sounding, and most of all, strong and weak songs.
When Forcefield opened with the eight and a half minute “Argentina (Parts I, II, III),” it was an unprecedented moment for Tokyo Police Club that really blew me away. Well…TPC doesn’t really have anything of this caliber, but there are some tracks that are similarly enjoyable curveballs. “Pigs” has some of the band’s best guitarwork to date, with a heavier sound that transitions from fuzzy riffs into a lead guitar melody towards the end. “Unseen” has a Weezer-ish flair for the dramatic, complete with singer David Monks briefly going acapella and a random exclamation of “cookie!” that I assume is a reference to John Lennon’s “Hold On.” “DLTFWYH,” which stands for “don’t let them fuck with your heart,” serves as the album’s mission statement, with self-referential lyrics and instrumentals meant to embody TPC’s new sound. Even if the chorus is just the track’s (unabridged) title repeated over and over, the song has a simple, approachable pop feel to it, and the band throws in a guitar solo for good measure.
Despite the potency of a few tracks on TPC, much of the album feels perfectly adequate. Opener “New Blues” is an example – it’s the album’s lead single and is packed with reverberating drums and guitar, but is also weighed down by a degree of monotony. “Hercules” has the most prominent hook on TPC, but the depth of your average landfill indie song, while “Simple Dude” is an apt title for a track whose chorus is “my eyes, your eyes, pulling me in closer.” Even when Tokyo Police Club adds a bit of flair, like getting the whole band to sing the bridge of the pop-tinged “Outtatime,” it’s a momentary attention grab that quickly fades.
The only song that really stands out from the crowd, for better or worse, is “Ready to Win.” It’s the sole track based around acoustic rather than electric guitar, but mostly gets its prominence from Monks dropping a whopping total of 26 f-bombs in the span of three minutes while reflecting on past mistakes and pumping himself up to learn from them. It’s an entertaining and kind of funny listen at first, but loses its charm with repetition, and might have been better placed at the very beginning or end of the album.
Tokyo Police Club apparently contemplated splitting up between the release of Forcefield and TPC, but Monks refused and said the band should at least go out with a bang, wanting to put together something akin to the band’s Abbey Road. Yet TPC certainly doesn’t feel like the band’s magnum opus, and instead feels like another Tokyo Police Club album. This isn’t to suggest it sounds like its predecessors, because that’s not really the case for any Tokyo Police Club album, but it contains a handful of memorable tracks alongside a slew of others you’ll draw a blank on soon after. It is intriguing how Tokyo Police Club keeps trying new styles with each release, and the way TPC doubles down on guitar-based rock certainly isn’t the worst way to go, but the constant reinvention pushes the band to being a jack of all trades, master of none.
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