Memphis Industries

As opening salvos go, Tokyo Police Club’s A Lesson In Crime EP was as twitchy and raw as they come when it arrived back in 2006. It was that year’s Modern Age, and arriving as it did just months after The Strokes first began to show their age on the cumbersome First Impressions Of Earth, the Canadian teens seemed the perfect candidates to take up the mantle of Casablancas and co. Indeed, A Lesson In Crime still sounds urgent, thrilling and downright brilliant to these ears today; which makes it all the more upsetting to report that the Tokyo Police Club of 2010 is a far tamer creature than that which burst onto the then-nascent blogosphere five years ago.

Admittedly things did look to be heading this way when the band’s first full-length outing turned out to be A Lesson In Crime-lite. But this writer has always retained a bit of a soft spot for Elephant Shell, and felt it got a tougher ride than it deserved when released in mid-’08. Whatever it lacked in ballsy attitude, it sure made up for in catchy tunes. Regrettably, though, TPC have kept maturing at such a rate that album number two, Champ, is a bore. For a band that once appeared on Desperate Housewives, the Torontonian quartet now looks in serious danger of turning into housewives’ favourites.

They've not gone the way of Kings Of Leon or anything, looking to fill stadia while phoning-in albums and avoiding the wrath of incontinent pigeons. Rather, the trouble is that the band don’t actually seem to have gone anywhere at all. You have to wait four songs here for any sort of spunk, and even then 'Wait Up (Boots Of Danger)' is really just whiny alt. rock-by-numbers. It takes five more tracks for the next sign of life on the equally unremarkable 'Big Difference.' The intervening tracks see the band veering from the synth-assisted ‘Bambi’ – which, in truth, sounds like watered-down filler from Julian Casablancas’ recent solo LP – to actually offering a glimmer of hope on the sweet-as-hell 'Hands Reversed'. The latter is by far the slowest number on Champ, and also easily its best, showing just how affecting Dave Monks’ vocals can be. As moving as it is, though, it's sadly let down by everything around it.

If one song sums up where Tokyo Police Club stand after Champ, it's the all-too-fittingly titled 'End Of A Spark': plain amateurish and instantly forgettable, it sounds like something a bunch of dropouts might write in their parents' garage. That's one bizarre notion for a band who, as kids, emerged as potential world-beaters.

Why There Are Mountains from New York’s Cymbals Eats Guitars is one of the best albums to be released this year.

Yes, I know it’s bad review etiquette to give much away too much too soon, and you really cant give much more away than that opening statement, but it’s not often an album like this comes along. It’s light and breezy, dark and intricate, quiet and loud, hooky and jammy. It’s everything that’s been lacking from so many releases this year. If only more bands were as brave as Cymbals Eat Guitars.

Let’s not get completely carried away, Why There Are Mountains isn’t the most original you’re ever likely to hear, touches of Modest Mouse here, splatters of The Pixies over there, but you can’t help but enjoy a band that takes its influences, wears them proudly on their fitted t-shirts and makes something beautiful, something interesting, something you can’t help but stand back and admire from them.

‘And The Hazy Sea’, the six-minute opening track instantly feels like it should be a noisy, tuneless, Pavement throwback, but it isn’t. It introduces itself with a bang, slams itself straight into your ear-canals, nestles itself comfortably into your subconscious then puts it arm round you like an old friend and takes you on a journey for the next five minutes and forty-five seconds through a landscape most bands fear to tread. There are piano breakdowns, fuzz induced wah-solos, screams, melodies, silences. It shouldn’t work, seriously - it has the fixings of a really bad Ben Folds out-take - but comes out the other end sounding like a beautifully woven tapestry of chaos and wonderment.

And just when you think you’re starting to figure things out, up pops ‘Cold Spring’ four tracks later with its angular guitar melodies that are somehow married wonderfully with a lilting violin compliment adding yet another texture to an already busy palette.

They can also play it straight however, as perfectly placed breath catching moment ‘Wind Phoenix’ lets you collect your thoughts before being thrown back into the heady wilderness of album closer ‘Like Blood Does’, a song which furthers the bands desires to move at their own pace. If it takes 7 minutes to get their point across to you, then they’ll take 7 minutes and what a great 7 minutes they’ll be, where a moments silence is as important as any filled with sound.

It’s such a joy to hear a band create the kind of horizon of different colours that Cymbals Eat Guitars have painted with Why They Are Mountains, and the fact that this is a debut led by someone who is only 21 years old makes this record and band all the more remarkable. 

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book: put joy and pain in the ring and let them fight it out. Anyone who’s ever heard Burt Bacharach or The Smiths will know the power of combining the two in the same moment, and of using the tension between music and lyrics to hint at the complicated emotions beneath.

It’s a trick which Papercuts’ Jason Quever has evidently studied closely, and the result, in the case of You Can Have What You Want, is a kind of sweet, elegant melancholy. The adjective “sunny” is a music reviewing cliché, but is hard to avoid here: the shimmering, glowing organ sounds which open the album sound like sunlight streaming in the window, and the steady drums and chugging bass which follow are the aural equivalent of waves of surf rolling in to the shore. The lyrics, though - “once we walked in the sunlight/three years ago last July” – introduce a more complicated, elegiac tone, one which resurfaces again and again throughout the album. When Quever sings the lyrics of the title track, for example, the minor chord progression lends the affirmative words a strangely ominous feeling; conversely, “Dead Love” rides along on a bouncy tune that makes for a strangely uplifting experience.

The tension also comes from the conflicting musical influences at play - the songs alternate between the playfulness of 60s French pop and the more introspective melancholy of modern indie (something accentuated by Quever’s echoey, breathy, sometimes fragile vocal, not unlike that of Cass McCombs). Sonically, the album is denser than its predecessor Can’t Go Back, due to the mostly electric instrumentation and the almost ubiquitous presence of Hammond organ. The latter might show the influence of Quever’s friends Beach House (Alex Scally guests here), and “The Void” strongly recalls the Baltimore duo (at least until the drums kick in). The songs also exhibit a shoegazey faith in the power of droning, repetitive structures, and are clearly the work of a man who has spent many an hour in the company of My Bloody Valentine and the Velvets.

While the influences are sometimes obvious, though, the album rarely feels derivative, and only improves from repeated listens. The classic elements are comfortably absorbed into Quever’s individual vision, and act as a base for an ambitious and adventurous exploration of his classic, dreamy pop aesthetic: as a whole, You Can Have What You Want feels cohesive and confident, and ultimately very satisfying.