Two Door Cinema Club: 'Tourist History'

Relentless good cheer, high energy, and a seeming assumption that electric guitars exist solely to generate crisp loops of euphoric whooping characterises this buoyant debut album from Bangor three-piece Two Door Cinema Club.

Bloc Party made this kind of music popular, and even imbued it with indie respectability, but it still has an alarming proximity to the deranged grinning of Busted or even the terror of Euro-pop, which may be why they are signed to a French label.

After a little scratching and spiralling around, opening track 'Cigarettes In The Theatre' bursts out of the starter gate like excited beef, although Alex Trimble’s vocal is like the sound of someone speaking deliberately calmly to stop a situation getting out of hand. This is the state of UK pop-rock today - a contained enthusiasm where edginess is apparently generated out of a dissonance between the rapidly homogenous world (we can’t smoke in theatres anymore...) and a recent, more deviant past (...but once we could). Like premature ejaculation, there is a sense that all the energy is used up very quickly. However, unlike this unfortunate sexual dysfunction, the results are not in the least messy.

This mixture sums up the entire record; decaffeinated bursts of rock, bound up into parcels of listenable enthusiasm. The package is almost ruthless in its commercial potential, like Dire Straits. Unfortunately, it is cleanliness and buoyancy to excess; form over content. 'Come Back Home' is all explosive choruses and derivative sentiment - in fact the lyrics (a tirade of disembodied nuggets of advice; “an opportunity you just can’t afford to waste, so have the lines in your head first for heavens’ sake”) perform a kind of double anaesthesia with the numbing, heavily produced music. 'Do You Want it All', meanwhile, starts in a crystalline arpeggio and honeyed vocal before submitting to a painfully repetitive nailing chorus in which the group softly chant the song’s title.

'This Is The Life' has some nifty guitar licks, and the light-hearted lyrical attitude meets the mood of the music, while 'Something Good Can Work' is also an undeniably adept work of instantly enjoyable and relatively complex pop. Elsewhere, loud-quiet choruses ('Undercover Martyn') and smug git acapella singing (the start of 'I Can Talk') come to dominate, a distinct and disappointing trend in British music going as far back as The Futureheads.

Another group who come to mind are The Wombats, TDCC inherit that group’s immediacy and occasionally their homely concerns (see 'Eat That Up It’s Good For You'), but lack Matthew Murphy’s winning way with a witty mini-narrative.

A ten track album of around 30 minutes, 'Tourist History' fits extremely well into the contemporary musical landscape, yet this is its downfall as much as it is strength. The entire piece is superficially enjoyable, and moments are even arresting, but fundamentally this is a record that changes nothing and the band joins legions of others who sound extremely similar.



Released on 1st March 2010 by Kitsuné.

Written by Huw Green.