Tokyo Police Club preview

Tokyo Police Club
Metro, Chicago
Monday, May 5, 2008

We music critics aren’t so good at math. If we were, we wouldn’t be music critics; we’d be providing some sort of real service to the world. Probably making real money too. But even us right brainers know 28 minutes divided by 11 songs equals not very much at all.

2.54545454545454 . . . that’s the average song length on Tokyo Police Club’s Elephant Shell (Saddle Creek). The longest, “Your English Is Good,” clocks in at a whopping 3:12. Believe it or not, this is an increase from 2006’s A Lesson In Crime EP. That album had 16 total minutes/seven songs; our cell phone calculators tell us that’s 2.29 (rounded off, or something) minutes per song. Listening to a TPC record doesn’t take too long, much like the band’s ascension to new-hot-shit status. It was only three years ago, after all, David Monks, Josh Hook, Graham Wright, and Greg Alsop formed the group in Newmarket Ontario. A year later they released Crime, which took off (more than 30,000 copies sold) when critics everywhere from The New York Times to Blender fell in love with the band’s highly infectious, highly energetic indie rock. The songs may only be a few minutes long, but TPC pack as much wallop as they can into that 120 seconds, and, we’ve been told, that’s what matters.

Smoosh and Maps And Atlases open.

– Trevor Fisher

Click here to hear streaming Tokyo Police Club samples.

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly