Tokyo Police Club - Elephant Shell

There’s a line in the song Listen To The Math, from Tokyo Police Club’s exceptional debut album Elephant Shell, that goes some way to summing up the fleeting career of the band thus far. Furthermore, it succinctly and conclusively encapsulates the puff of publicity that’s been following them about since the Lesson In Crime EP was released in 2006. “You’ve been famous since your birth,” sings Dave Monks in the witty, nasal tone he assumes throughout the album. With Elephant Shell, they have ruthlessly and efficiently exceeded the hype, sticking by their guns in the process. Shotguns, that is. Their tantalising earlier releases were lessons in truncation, but have come in for some undue condemnation on account of their brevity. With much of the (often excellent) music emanating from Canada these days mirroring the sprawling and spacious plains of, say, Quebec and Saskatchewan, it’s refreshing to see TPC release a compact and breathless album, perhaps equally inspired by the spiky and claustrophobic metropolitis of their Northern Toronto homes. Along with Born Ruffians and various other notable exceptions, they’ve shown here that the blueprint for contemporary Canadian music need not always adhere to the aforementioned clichés to be successful. To coin a phrase, bigger isn’t always better.

Of the eleven tracks on show here, only one exceeds the three minute mark, the anthemic future single Your English Is Good. It’s as close as TPC get to highfalutin, with its playground politic chant (“Oh, give us your vote!”) and is the nearest relative here to their magnificent debut track Nature Of The Experiment. Elephant Shell is by no means epic, but it is, perhaps paradoxically, charmingly verbose. At times the lyrics risk creating a garrulous ‘wordier than thou’ persona (note the nonchalant nods to the extinct Australopithecus genus) but Monks effortlessly dismisses such notions with countless lyrical nuggets (check the self-effacing “stain my teeth with more red wine/ I’m a romantic but never pearly white” on In A Cave), belying the band’s tender years.

Sonically, Elephant Shell is rhythmically complex but as melodically simple as it can be without ever sounding tired or hackneyed. The opening brace of Centennial and In A Cave are as good an introduction to an album you’ll hear this year: Monks’ vocals quintessentially Stoic, with the effervescent percussion and ubiquitous transcending guitar and keyboard riffs encircling his delivery. It grows in prominence throughout though, and by the time we reach the climactic Listen To The Math, it’s become the centrepiece of the sound. Bells and whistles are few and far between, and when they come they’re represented tastefully by surf-pop doo wops (Graves) and splashes of xylophone (The Harrowing Adventures Of…), adding to the contained jubilance that dominates Elephant Shell’s mood.

“I’ll try but I’ll never be a gentleman,” vows Dave Monks on Graves, with a welcome lack of sincerity in his voice. If TPC continue to deliver brilliant, sharp, bold indie pop tunes like these, then here’s hoping he keeps such promises. Sure, they spent a couple of years teasing us, but with Elephant Shell, the upstarts of Tokyo Police Club have definitely proved themselves worth the wait.