Tokyo Police Club
Elephant Shell
Saddle Creek
By Jose Fritz
Dave Monks has a flawless, pretty voice. It’s so pristine, so smooth it almost emasculates him. What must that feel like, to sing and to hear those perfect notes emanate like he’s some kind of castrato. Thom Yorke has a similar condition but he’s very nasal and you can hear that sphenoidal texture. Dave Monks is more like a mellotron, just inhumanly even in tone and timber. He makes Chris Martin seem like Tom Waits. Am I exaggerating? I can’t tell anymore.
That voice boxes them in; it presents a challenge. How do angelic vocals grant themselves to rock? Dave treats them like a thick layer of frosting atop whatever else happens to be writhing and breathing below. He masks and emphasizes this in alternating waves with cascades of soft synthesizer chords, or a blitzkrieg of high hat wash. The songs cease and become backdrops for gentle acapella work and regenerate from a series of hand claps. It was part of what made their first EP so big.
A lot of people saw A Lesson in Crime as an EP. Well it was only seven songs, and it clocked in at barely over 15 minutes long. But it was a good 15 minutes, perhaps even an extraordinary 15 minutes. Not quite as good as good sex; that would take longer than 15 minutes, but memorable, significant, and damn fine. It was a shining moment, if in you can allow your definition of a moment to stretch out for 15 whole minutes. Now, the Canadian quartet, has finally released a proper full length LP it’s so tightly brilliant that it tessellates, but still clocks in at under 30 minutes.
I can’t say for certain that it was their intention but Elephant Shell is not a random amalgam of words. It’s a mollusk shell, one native to the north pacific coast and the Columbia River. The Tillamook Indians sometimes pierced their columella with a sliver of Elephant Shell. The connection to Tokyo Police Club is unclear; no more clear than their own seemingly meaningless name. It’s fitting for a band that was almost created by a cover shot on NME and the Montreal Pop Festival. Before that they were just four boys from Ontario being very lazy.
There are no songs about robots this time. You can’t write them off as pop punk or sci-fi pop. Elephant Shell shakes of the few disparaging labels that previously adhered to their career. But the short bursts of energy compressed into each song are still there. They have a strange resemblance to some of the other Canadian Invasion bands: Arcade Fire, Shout Out Out Out, You Say Party, We Say Die. But the overtures are different. Tokyo Police Club is distinctly and arguably a rock band. They will persist, they will survive —and we’ll eventually forget the names of those other bands. Then maybe one day distantly in the future, they’ll record a record that’s more than half an hour long.
|
