When Tokyo Police Club burst onto the scene, the group was immediately burdened with ridiculous hype. It’s not that the band didn’t make great tunes, but the level of expectation heaped on the Canadian quartet would be enough to suffocate most any band’s creativity. The people throwing the buzz around clearly lost sight of what Tokyo Police Club is. The group was never going to be “the next big thing” filling arenas with indie devotees (mainly because no one this side of Death Cab for Cutie fits that description). Tokyo Police Club is the type of group that operates best as scrappy underdogs, garnering a moderate but passionate fanbase and blowing them away in clubs – not arenas. Champ delivers just what those fans want.
Tokyo Police Club has sonically changed a great deal since 2006′s tremendous EP A Lesson In Crime. The group members are no longer shouty upstarts and Champ displays a real range in songwriting. It starts with the album’s opener “Favourite Food,” which begins with electronic drones only to give way to a bare-bones Neutral Milk Hotel sounding acoustic ramblings – with singer Dave Monks delivering worn and a quarter-slurred lines of melancholy. Then, somehow, the track finishes as a clappy rocker. The song varies about as much as one can in a four minute span. The songwriting array is also on display on songs like “Hands Reversed,” which pulls of a slow tempo – in a way that the band couldn’t have in its early days – thanks to a reserved mood and a sense of space that avoids unnecessary instrumental clutter.
That purview noted, the band still is at its best when things get fast and fun. “Bambi” starts out with a positively killer mash up of fluttering electronic sounds that force involuntary head bobs and shoulder shakes, and the rest of the track keeps up momentum brilliantly. The jerky dance vibe of “Big Difference” and the jovially jaunty “Wait Up (Boots of Danger)” also shine with similar energy.
Champ‘s biggest lags come when the band tried to split the difference tempo wise, like on “Not Sick” and “End of a Spark.” This middling pace is a tad punch-less – almost as if the band tried to force something that isn’t in its wheelhouse just for sake of variety. Fortunately, these missteps are more bumps in the road than anything that actually derides the album’s trajectory.
As long as you accept Tokyo Police Club for what it is and not what hype machine hyperbole led some to believe, then it’s hard not to dig a little Champ.
Review Score: 8.1
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