Tokyo Police Club
Forcefield (Memphis Industries)
04/20
“Operator! Get me the President of the world. This is an emergency.” With that precocious and endearing line from their second single Cheer It On, Tokyo Police Club announced themselves to the world in 2006. From then on their well-meaning dose of scrappy pop won a heap of praise and got many an 18-year-old wiggling awkwardly at their nearest indie disco. Eight years later and sadly not even the President of the world, not even a be-caped Obama with mind-altering laser eyes, could save Tokyo Police Club from the dire peril of their own third album.
Gone are singer Dave Monks’ youthful yelps and bonkers yet affecting lyrics. Gone is the messy sense of space in their recordings that gave those high-gain bass and tremolo guitar lines room to manoeuvre. Instead, we have a soulless slab of nonsense, typified by the leading track Argentina. Preposterously long at over eight minutes, it meanders from a banal pop-rock opening into a section which for all intents and purposes sounds like a completely different track, and probably should have been. The whole thing smacks of over-production from the get-go, with Monks’ vocal in the opening verses hideously effected with the ‘underwater robot’ treatment. Following on is the single Hot Tonight, which is catchy in that infuriating teenbait way. And so it continues in a downward spiral of production that smothers everything like an oil slick, and songwriting which is somewhere between dull and downright annoying. To dissect Forcefield any further would be to indulge in an act of schadenfreude, so our advice is to listen to Your English Is Good and Nature of the Experiment on repeat until TPC can sweep this under the carpet and put out something worthwhile.
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Words: Andrew Broaks
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