Tokyo Police Club/ Champ

Tokyo Police Club
Champ
(Memphis Industries)

In the olden days of the 1980s, music magazines would ask idiotic but great questions of their subjects. Questions such as ‘Favourite Food’ and ‘Favourite Colour’ – coincidentally the names of the first two tracks on the new Tokyo Police Club album.
In some respects it was disappointing to learn that the band weren’t imitating the tradition of Smash Hits Magazine, but instead going for a good old aural assault to kick off their second record.
The four-piece have developed a sense of narrative showmanship, college rock leaning harmonies and buzzing energy with this album. It’s a lesson in simplicity, in which nobody is particularly outsmarting the other instrumentally, but rather every song is executed with space to breathe.
The sweet summertime can almost be felt refracting off the frets on ‘Big Difference’, while the glitch-rock keys of ‘Bambi’ very much belie the track’s tame-titled namesake. Meanwhile, Dave Monks’ lyrics present a slipping sense of the self, darting from the stories of others to his own feelings of mistrust, without burdening the songs with such serious issues.
‘Champ’ bounds along like a monkey on a rampage, and things are still very much alive by the time we get to the reverbed-up electronica of closer ‘Frankenstein.’ Job well done.