Tokyo Police Club
Nature of the Experiment

Any band writing a song containing the line “We’re halfway up the bracket” will hopefully have braced themselves beforehand for the pointing of fingers and cries of “derivative whores!” which’re likely to follow. Even if, as with Tokyo Police Club, there’s a fair bit of ground between you and Les Libs, it’s still wise to batten down the hatches before releasing your jangly indie-pop meets post-Strokes disillusioned-yet-chirpy opus.

Whether TPC took these precautions, we will never know. What we can be sure of is that their song is fairly high-paced, with quite prominent bass and echoing, trebley guitars under sorta tuneful vocals singing cryptic lyrics about… something. Running away? Falling in love? His mother’s accent? His mother’s love-life as relates to the opinions others have of her accent? All this and more?

Whatever the message, the medium is one of those which simply doesn’t stir. It carries little emotion – a vague hint of temporary melancholy is the best it can do. It doesn’t urge one to dance, inspire one to fall in love, do anything much beyond clatter along for two minutes in a not unpleasant but hardly wonderful manner. And then it stops. And one can’t help but wonder quite why it bothered starting.