The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department was formed in 1874, and today has 42,101 sworn members, 26 boats, 14 helicopters, 951 bikes, 1,103 cars, 33 dogs, and 16 horses. They recently launched a new campaign to urge elderly drivers to give up their licenses after the accident rate involving drivers over 70 years of age skyrocketed in Tokyo by 35% while overall accident rates fell. Um….. wait….. I’m totally reviewing the wrong organization. They’re a great police department though, really, I researched them…. very thorough and ethical. More horses would be cool, though.

The subject of this review is actually supposed to be Tokyo Police Club, a band that was formed just outside of Toronto in 2005. They don’t have any horses at all, but they do have a tour bus that’s been getting a lot of use since they graduated high-school. It all started when they were invited to play at the Pop Montreal music festival. Since then, they’ve gone on to play practically every major rock music festival, from Coachella to Lolapalooza to Reading to Glastonbury, and sold out shows across the continent and Europe. Their first EP, 2006’s A Lesson In Crime, sold 30,000 copies, enough to draw the attention and acclaim of Rolling Stone, Blender, Entertainment Weekly, and more even though it was only 16 minutes long. They signed to Paper Bag Records and, while collecting fans by the Myspace-friends-page-load with their frenetic live shows and stirring up the media world with buzz, they recorded their first full album, Elephant Shell. The expectations were high when the record label announced the albums’ release date of March 25th. So much so that it was leaked early, and all of the fans had heard the album by the time it was for sale. Read on after the gap…………

It was with all this hullabaloo in mind that I first laid ears on Elephant Shell (a little late, I might add). The band is well-known for its live show passion, with a sound that frontman Dave Monks describes as “wide-eyed post-punk with a tendency to get over excited - so much so that someone has to come and tell it to settle down”. So apparently they’re an enthusiastic group of blokes, and it’s hard to put people like that down. Its just… well their whole shtick is kind of same-old-same-old. It’s been done better before, so why keep trying to drag it out. Hot Hot Heat already did it four years ago, they we’re just catchier and more poofy-haired. And even they were following a trend that had already been long-established. It’s not to say that Tokyo Police Club aren’t good or that they’re another Hot Hot Heat. Even if it is a little ho-hum overall, there are some decent original tracks on the new album.

The best song on Elephant Shell, actually released as a single last summer, called “Your English Is Good”, is a road-trip-with-the-windows-down-and-speakers-blasting kind of song. As a single, this song kicks ass, with Scottish-style shout-chanting and a good-times-partying-with-friends kind of vibe. “Tesselate” blends drum pounding, energetic tambourine shaking, and a piano motif riffing to create another party starter. The short opener song “Centennial” is in a way reminiscent of the meandering vocals over a driving sonic backdrop style that Postal Service sometimes uses, if Postal Service were indie rock. Much of the album is like this, with daydreaming, half-interested vocals carried along by a sugar-high band trying to get laid. The lyrics are generally nonsensical or meant to be passed over as such. “Tessellate” for example just sounds like a funny made-up word until you Wikipedia it and find out it’s basically a dumb-sounding word for tiling (so next time people are over you can show off your tessellated linoleum bathroom floor). In fact, the very name of the band came from self-admitted nonsensical lyrics from an early song called “Cheer It On.” The point is that they’re a little bit clever but don’t want to appear clever so that they don’t ruin the party with too much thinking. But then, if you’re bored, you can waste some time looking up words like tessellate or pondering what kind of shell an elephant could have while admiring the fact that they were clever enough to come up with this stuff.

Elephant Shell is kind of like indie fast-food. All of the songs are short - only one is longer than three minutes - so it’s easy to digest. It’s fun and enjoyable, but in the end not all that fulfilling. If you can get past the fact that they sound like every other band and that you’ll probably forget this album by September, then you might dig it. There’s no question, though, that for a group of guys that only learned to play music about four years ago, Tokyo Police Club are talented and will probably get a hell of a lot better with time. If they stop just doing what’s popular and maybe get a couple of horses, they could be around for a while, and that would be okay. Plus, they have a cool name. I mean, what’s cooler than a bunch of Japanese cops lounging around smoking cigars, playing pool, and shooting the shit about all the old people hitting pedestrians.

For more useless opinions, read Tokyo Police Club keyboardist Graham Wright’s informative reviews of public bathrooms and advanced-technology hand dryers here.

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