Tokyo Police Club Interview

Canadian post-punks Tokyo Police Club may have only formed five years ago, but they have an impressive CV for such a young band. Two well-received EPs in their formative years led to a deal with Conor Oberst’s Saddle Creek label to release their début album, 2008’s Elephant Shell. Unfortunately for TPC, Elephant Shell wasn’t quite the success they hoped for, but the band re-grouped and have returned with the critically acclaimed Champ. Early signs point towards the group fulfilling the potential they’ve always shown. Add this to a busy touring schedule and it seems that 2010 could truly be Tokyo Police Club’s year. In the middle of their busy summer, Greg from the band found time to email a response to No Ripcord’s questions.

How are you finding the reaction to your new album and what are your hopes for it?

The first reactions have been really positive so far. I haven't read a lot of the reviews, but we've been getting a great response from fans at our shows every night. It's really satisfying to go out on stage and break into a new song and have people start dancing and singing along to it. It's really the best reaction you can hope for.

General consensus on this record is that it’s a step forward and you’re making good on the promise shown earlier in your career - would you say that’s a fair assessment and do you feel you’re continuing to develop as a band?

Yeah, we are all definitely really happy with this album. I hope that if people in 2006 who liked our EP could listen forward to what we're doing now they'd be happy and not feel like we've veered off in some disappointing direction. I think we've learned to just trust our initial gut instincts more and not second guess what our first ideas are for a song. They're usually the right way to go, so it was a lot less of "start, stop, re-write, go back to what you had" process with this record and more of just a constant flow of ideas forward. It feels like a more natural progression for us, and I hope people can hear that.

What was the thinking behind setting up the Champ Championship and what’s the best challenge you’ve had so far? [The Champ Championship is a TPC invention where fans can challenge the band to a competition of their choosing with the chance to win prizes]

The Champ Champion contest is basically just a way to have some fun and meet new people in the cities we travel to on tour. It's really often that you get to a town in the mid-afternoon, setup, find some mediocre food in the area and then have a few hours to do absolutely nothing till the show begins. I think we all got tired of just having "laptop circle parties" in our dressing room, where everyone is just staring at their computers, surfing the internet, completely bored, and wanted to actually have a chance to do something in our time off before we play. With this contest, we get to pull into town and then ask the people there, "What do you guys do here for fun?" and instead of them just giving us an answer, "Oh, well there's the pencil museum and the miniature tea set collection in town square...", like you would get from a travel site, we get, "What do we do here? Effin’ Three-Legged Races! Backwards! And Blindfolded!" Done! Let's do that! In Baltimore we had a couple come out and just challenge us to clean and eat steamed blue crabs. What kind of amazing people offer that up as a challenge? And if you've ever seen The Wire, you'll know that was definitely the best way to spend an afternoon in Baltimore.

You have several special packages for fans available on your website. Why have you decided to do this and do you think it’s important for bands to try and connect with your fans in such a way?

I think it's important to give your fans a chance to connect with you in as complete a way as you're willing to offer. We're all huge fans of music and we love it when you get to see some behind the scenes shots or video of a favourite band of ours rehearsing, or just goofing around. I think that extends to the album and the music on it. Like, how with some of our CDs you get a collage that Dave made of all his lyrics and notes he made while writing them. It just gives an insight into our creative process and mechanics as a band that I know with bands I love, I'd be really interested in seeing.

You seem to have a pretty heavy tour schedule for the remainder of 2010 - what are you particularly looking forward to?

Honestly, right now we're all just excited to be playing live again. We stopped touring almost completely in early 2009 to start work on this album so we'd been off the stage for almost a year and a half before we began playing live again recently. You can get pretty exhausted by life on the road and there's definitely always a point on tour where you realize you just need to get home soon or you're going to go crazy. But being away from it for that long you really begin to miss just being on stage together and you remember why you started playing music in the first place. It's a real rush again for us to get on stage every night, so I think we're having more fun now than we've had since we started touring back in 2006. It's a blast to be a band again.

What bands and artists are your main inspiration when writing songs and looking for ideas?

We all love the Strokes and Radiohead, but I'm not sure if they'd be where we draw ideas from. Bands like that constantly remind us that we've still got so much room to grow as song-writers - it's always really humbling to put on a record like Is This It or Kid A and just be blown away every time. I think we draw a lot of inspiration from our contemporaries; bands that we know and love and play shows with who are growing up and developing their sound around us. I get really inspired by just hearing what new exciting music is coming out each month and then dissecting it and figuring out what they're doing and learning from it. It's really great to be able to just look around you for inspiration and find it everywhere. It's still a really exciting time for music and I'm glad to be a part of it.

What new bands coming through do you think are worth watching out for?

We just played at a few festivals with this band from Australia called The Middle East and I think they're amazing. I really loved their sets each night and everyone in the band is just really talented and puts out such an intense performance where they’re playing at peak level all the way to the end. If you get a chance to see them live soon, do it!

Finally, How did you end up appearing on Desperate Housewives and how did you find it?

Desperate Housewives was a fun experience. Our friend, Paul Bullock, is a writer on the show and it came up that they needed a band for a story arc they were working on and he suggested us. The only strange part is how, since the show exists in it's own "universe" apart from our reality, we couldn't be called Tokyo Police Club and they had to change our name to Cold Splash. So, now there might a large contingent of 40-something women out there who are Cold Splash's biggest fans.

The Mercury Prize 2010

It’s the time of year when a bunch of people in “the biz” put their heads together and come up with a dozen acts to put forward for the Mercury Prize (or, to give it its full title, The Barclaycard Mercury Prize). Almost as traditional as the mid-July unveiling of the list is the customary griping about the make-up of said list. People always say that Christmas seems to be getting earlier year on year, but I think the gap between the releasing of the list and the deluge of criticism of the choices is getting smaller as each twelve month passes. In fact, some music journalists on Twitter, so jaded of the inevitable impending criticism, were pretending to have a moan about the judges’ selections an hour or so before the list was made public.

So, since we’re here, why don’t we sit down, have a nice cup of tea, peruse the albums on the list and offer up our views on this year’s shortlist?

Actually, do you mind if we don’t? My opinions on the list will be incredibly similar to yours and pretty much anyone else who’s decided to vent their spleen on the subject. All critiques follow a simple formula, namely: “I’m glad they included [Band A], what are they doing including [Band B] and what kind of moron would leave out [Band C]?” My Band A, B and C are The xx, Biffy Clyro and Field Music respectively - yours will probably be different - but it’s completely immaterial really.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a piece rubbishing the prize or even the concept of it. The majority of awards are fairly meaningless, and the Mercury is better than most at making brave choices and not necessarily kowtowing to public opinion. The point is that this hackneyed, predictable cliché of dismissing the list as worthless is beyond tiresome.

As far as I can tell, anyone who writes off the list would only be happy if their favourite twelve records of the year made up the Mercury shortlist, but how realistic is that? The chances of a team of experts and professionals coming together and choosing the exact dozen you want on the list are fairly slim. Guess what, everyone, taste is subjective, and your favourite album of the year not making the cut equates to a difference of opinion rather than a failure on the part of the award.

While we’re on the subject, the whole concept of “the best album of the year” is near-impossible to pin down. How do you define “best”? Most enjoyable, most inventive, most different, most surprising or any other superlative you care to toss into the ring? Any award for the “best” anything is wildly open to interpretation: in 1997, Titanic won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but how was that the best? If you’re judging “best” in terms of special effects or box office gross then the victory is fairly undisputable, but if you think of “best” pertaining to story or dialogue, then the success of Titanic (and subsequent nomination of Avatar for the same award in 2009) must be one of the indications of the impending apocalypse.

Critics also like to find trends amongst the winners of the Mercury prize: another pretty fruitless exercise. Attempting to apply anything remotely mathematically rigorous to such a small data set (there have been 18 winners) where the choice of who is victorious is influenced by so many external factors is essentially futile. There is a different panel of judges each year, attitudes change, scenes come and go, and if you want to predict who’s going to win this year, a look at the role call of previous champions will tell you absolutely nothing.

There is also the much-vaunted “Curse of the Mercury”: examples of acts fading into obscurity after their prize win, such as Talvin Singh and Ms. Dynamite. This was said to have been “lifted” in 2008 with the success of Elbow, but its return was heralded last year with a poor post-win sales showing from Speech Debelle. Interestingly, no-one seems to argue that a Mercury Prize win offers a significant boost in sales for an album. So, considering the fact no-one’s ever won the prize twice and a win means units shifted, it’s little surprise that follow-ups tend to relatively under-perform.

What was meant to be a defence of the Mercury Prize looks to have turns out as a defiant stance against the nay-sayers, but the point remains. The Mercury Prize is an interesting award, can lead to healthy debate and often rewards acts that look to do something out of the ordinary with their music. So, this year, let’s not pass judgement prematurely, let’s acknowledge that not everyone agrees with our own personal tastes and let’s look upon it as an opportunity to discover something that may have otherwise slipped through the cracks. The Mercury Prize has honoured fantastic artists like Suede, Pulp, PJ Harvey and Dizzee Rascal, while giving much-needed publicity to smaller acts like Burial, Fionn Regan, Seth Lakeman and, this year, Kit Downes Trio. It should be celebrated in what it seeks to do, whether we agree with the winner or not.

That said, if Corinne Bailey Rae wins on September 7, the judging panel are clearly a load of cloth-eared cretins who wouldn’t know a decent tune if it slapped them round the face of a weekend. But then again, that’s just my opinion…

/\/\/\Y/\

M.I.A. - /\/\/\Y/\

released 12 July 2010 on XL

London-born Sri Lankan Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam could just be the perfect pop star. She’s that irresistible, hard-to-ignore mix of intrigue, fun, controversy, branding know-how and beauty. She’s always on hand with a quotable soundbite, whether it be pertaining to herself, other artists or political activism. Last year, she was listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 “World’s Most Influential People” and - despite not even considering herself a musician - she’s already made two albums of glorious, cacophonous, joyous, genre-melting, Technicolor pop. Both Arular and Kala tore up the rule book, with M.I.A.’s keen magpie-like musical eye picking out hip-hop beats, playground rhymes, bhangra rhythms, philosophical rhetoric and unlikely sound effects, and blending them into something greater than the sum of their parts. In 2005, none other than Nas called M.I.A. the sound of the future and over the last five years, he’s been proved correct.

However, M.I.A.’s latest LP, the typically contrarily-titled /\/\/\Y/\ - or, if you prefer, Maya - hasn’t quite been receiving the praise of her previous two efforts. This review comes over a week after the album has been on general release, and while it may be considered bad form to read the views and reports of others before setting out to chronicle your own opinions of a record, the fallout has been difficult to sidestep. So, why the cold shoulder for /\/\/\Y/\? Has M.I.A. really released a dud, or is it the revenge of the hack - payback for M.I.A. tweeting the telephone number of New York Times journalist Lynn Hirschberg after an unfavourable profile? Happily, I can report that M.I.A. has NEVER made my telephone number available in the public domain (she doesn’t even have my number - ha! More fool her), so you can rest assured this review is free from any personal vendetta I may have had.

Although M.I.A.’s endlessly quotable persona can be a gift to the press, she does tend to lean heavily towards conspiracy theory on occasion. She recently claimed that the Sri Lankan government are watching her and her child, and the theme of invasion of privacy continues with opening track, The Message, where over a burbling bass motif, a distorted, robotic voice unemotionally states that “the iPhone’s connected to the Internet connected to the Google connected to the government”. Outlandish maybe, but about ten times more interesting and inflammatory as you’re likely to get from your average airhead pop strumpet.

Where M.I.A. really excels though, is her innate ability to create an addictive kaleidoscope of sound, crashing disparate elements together and forcing them to fuse like a persistently stubborn alchemist.Steppin Up, in particular, is an intoxicatingly heady mix of drills, urban machinery, whistles and the kind of playground rhymes you’d expect to hear over footage of schoolgirls playing Double Dutch in the street. An interesting side-effect of listening to M.I.A. is that the utter uncompromising brashness of her music is so exhilarating that it can inspire confidence in you. Try listening to Steppin Up or the jackhammer drums and crunching, clipped riffs of Meds and Feds while walking through a populated area and it’ll make you feel around ten feet tall.

M.I.A. isn’t a one-trick pony, however, and she deftly demonstrates that she can do things slightly more subtly when required. Paper Planes is her best-known song and her most accessible, and it’s a combination she looks to repeat on leading single, XXXO. It’s odd to hear M.I.A. not rallying against some form of oppression and doing what could almost be considered a traditional love ballad, but her restrained vocals give the music the chance to take hold and envelop your senses. The disorienting recipe of huge bass drum, auto-tune and hardly any mid-range make Tell Me Why consistently intriguing, and the Animal-from-the-Muppets drumming, buzzing riff and primal vocals make Born Free a defiant joy.

All this means that /\/\/\Y/\ has some of the best tracks of any album you’ll hear this year. When M.I.A.’s on her game, there really is no-one to touch her. It may well be heavily disguised by the spacing of the good songs but unfortunately, /\/\/\Y/\ just seems to not have enough ideas. Maybe it’s no longer being able to provide “the shock of the new”, maybe it’s the distraction of family life, maybe it’s just a stumble or maybe it’s - whisper it quietly - the fact she’s so busy courting controversy she’s lost sight of what made her great in the first place, but this album sounds half-baked on more than one occasion. Teqkilla is a bad title and a worrying example of when M.I.A.’s Midas touch deserts her, It Takes a Muscle is rancid ska-lite and final track, Space, is disappointingly non-descript.

In fact, the blandness of a closing track of Space is symptomatic of the contradictory nature of /\/\/\Y/\: an album that veers between quixotic brilliance and insipid dullness. It’s possible that the crossover success of Paper Planes has left M.I.A. in a difficult position where she wants to stay true to her roots and ethos whilst also attempting to break into the mainstream. On the evidence of /\/\/\Y/\, she could be in danger of achieving neither.

Let’s get some perspective here, /\/\/\Y/\ is a good album by anyone’s standards. However, it’s the fact we’re judging it against M.I.A.’s (granted, incredibly high) standards that it’s so frustrating, and we all know she can do better. M.I.A. has now made a trilogy of inventive, engrossing records, but for the sake of music we’d all better hope that /\/\/\Y/\ isn’t the beginning of the end.

My Night in with... Tracey Thorn

from www.wordmagazine.co.uk and published in the August 2010 edition of The Word magazine...

What's it called?:

Love and Its Opposite

What It Sounds Like:

The kind of grown-up pop music you wish more people would make. Everything But The Girl were often labelled "sophisti-pop" by critics - sneeringly suggesting coffee table music with little substance - but lead singer Thorn has made a fantastic album which is as unashamedly sophisticated as they come. The arrangements are careful and professional, and the lyrics capture the frustrations and difficulties of being a 40-something woman in the second decade of the 21st Century. Love and its Opposite shows Thorn can write domestic vignettes with astonishing detail and candour and is a wonderful record.

What Does It All "Mean"?:

That it's ok to be afraid of aging, divorce and the worrying speed that your children grow up. It also means Tracey Thorn is becoming a national treasure.

Goes well with...:

A quiet reflective evening when a reassuring voice would be appreciated, as well as any time you feel like being thankful for what you've got.

Might Suit People Who Like...:

Everything But the Girl (obviously), Portishead's more reflective moments, The xx, Joni Mitchell. It should also be required listening for anyone who thinks Lily Allen and Kate Nash are the queens of unabashed, honest lyricism.

The Hold Steady: Live

The Hold Steady: Live at The Forum, Kentish Town

If you know a Hold Steady fan (which you surely do), the chances are they won’t just “quite like” The Hold Steady, they’ll be completely head-over-heels for them. I’ve always found their marriage of huge, crunching riffs and creative storytelling more than merely diverting, but it’s never really clicked. Whilst there are more than enough Hold Steady evangelists in this world, I’m something of a Hold Steady agnostic.

Standing in the Kentish Town Forum with the regulation pint of over-priced lager, I had two reservations about the impending show. Firstly, The Hold Steady is unpretentious, straight-up rock, so will they be able to maintain momentum for ninety minutes? Secondly, what elevates The Hold Steady above countless other guitar-heavy combos is the intricate narratives weaved by band leader Craig Finn. When confronted with a tri-guitar attack, will these nuances be lost in an enveloping wall of sound?

As the band sauntered on, it was immediately obvious they were nothing less than delighted to be playing music for a living. The trademark riffs rang out, the drums kicked in and Craig Finn flailed around, looking like an overly-friendly chemistry teacher who’d won a competition to front his favourite band for the night. Within around a minute, I noticed I had a big, stupid grin plastered over my fizzog, as had the guy next to me, and the guy next to him, and, come to think of it, the entire band. I’d been seduced so quickly I felt cheap.

That slightly manic smile stayed with me throughout. Finn is a mesmerising, if unlikely front-man who had the crowd eating out of his hand for the entire show. Yes, many of his words were drowned out by his band but he did his utmost to ensure we knew what he was singing about, with wild gesticulations and actions after every line. At times it was as if he were engaged in an impromptu game of one-man charades, as he charged up and down the stage like a guy who just couldn’t believe his luck.

The Hold Steady was having a party and we were all invited. Their relationship with the audience mixed with the communal football-chant nature of many of their songs to create the world’s happiest mob. Their overriding message is “Stay Positive” and as a sweaty and delighted crowd trooped out into a balmy, midsummer night - it really was a case of job done. They weren’t entirely preaching to the converted, but they’d certainly taught me the ways of The Hold Steady.

Hi, by the way, my name’s Joe. Did I mention I’m a really big Hold Steady fan?

The ArchAndroid: Suites II and III

Janelle Monáe - The ArchAndroid: Suites II and III

released 12 July 2010 on Bad Boy/Atlantic

Over a decade ago, Destiny’s Child put out a call for “all the women who are independent” to “throw their hands up at me”. The irony that this track,Independent Women (Part 1), was prominent on the soundtrack of the first Charlie’s Angels film - basically a story of three strong, feisty women… who have all their movements controlled by a man named Charlie - appeared to be lost on Beyoncé and co. Over the next ten years, the concept of feminism and free-thinking women hardly thrived in popular music, as the stronghold of commercial hip-hop - much of which is preoccupied with the acquisition material goods and misogyny - grew and grew. In fact, even Beyoncé herself seemed to give up: in 2001 she was a survivor who “ain’t gonna give up”, but just four years later, Destiny’s Child wanted to Cater 2 U and by 2008, well, “if you like it then you should’ve put a ring on it”.

Obviously the fact that contemporary R&B hasn’t had a female star intent on doing things on her own terms since Lauryn Hill went AWOL isn’t expressly Beyoncé’s fault, but the world needs a saviour. If the music press is to be believed, our heroine has arrived in the shape of Janelle Monáe: a 5ft waif with extravagantly coiffeured hair and a penchant for afrofuturism (well, haven’t we all?). On the evidence of Monáe’s début full-length LP, The ArchAndroid, she isn’t just here to save music, she wants to take us on a ride through history too.

In short, the sheer breadth of styles on display during The ArchAndroid is simply astonishing. Sure, it comfortably clocks in at over an hour, but it still dabbles with hip-hop, jazz, swing, pop, salsa and rockabilly with consummate panache in that time. Almost as if to prove she isn’t your ordinary, interchangeable R&B poppet, The ArchAndroid begins with Suite II Overture - a neo-classical orchestral piece with robotic voices, which evokes Disney’s Fantasia if it were rewritten in the year 2100.

The future is a theme which runs throughout The ArchAndroid, but the influence of so many of soul and hip-hop’s biggest names means that this album could conceivably be from any year between 1985 and 2020. Faster is an exhilarating mix of hip-hop and 1920s swing, Say You’ll Go is a ballad with African percussion which seamlessly morphs into a piano piece created to showcase Monáe’s stunning voice, andMake the Bus is high campery - like an R&B Gaga - featuring Of Montreal.

A concept album The ArchAndroid may be, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stand-out individual tracks. Locked Inside is the 21st Century cousin of Michael Jackson’s Rock With You and could comfortably fit on Off The Wall (yes, it’s that good). The frantic, sprinting beats of OutKast’s B.O.B. are imitated on the genuinely thrilling Cold War and if you thought that was good, the following track is surely the best song of 2010 so far: Tightrope. You’ll have no doubt heard Tightrope by now, and probably seen the video with an androgynous Monáe fully suited-up, replete with bowtie, and shimmying as if the floor were slathered with grease. Tightrope may be well-known, but that doesn’t diminish its potency: Monáe confidently throwing out urgent syllables, funky brass stabs, rousing vocals and a typically expert guest verse from Big Boi.

The story goes that Monáe was discovered by OutKast - she appears on their 2006 soundtrack album,Idlewild, and also crops up on current Big Boi long-player, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty - so comparisons are inevitable. However, Monáe could well be the female counterpart to the Atlanta duo, with that comfort and ease with which she inhabits a range of genres, and etherealness that suggests she’s been beamed in from another planet. She may well have borrowed the torch OutKast inherited from Funkadelic and Prince, and she’s certainly a worthy guardian.

For a first album, The ArchAndroid is astoundingly accomplished. It would be a lie to say there aren’t a few lulls in the back end of the record as Monáe begins to take fewer risks, but only the truly seminal albums can keep the quality level so high for over an hour. However, just as you’re lured into thinking the album’s petering out, it closes with BaBopByeYa: a sprawling, nine-minute odyssey encapsulating everything great about this record. Equal parts smoky club jazz, salsa and rousing Bond theme,BeBopByeYa is a bombastic display of intent that shows the clear talent Monáe has her disposal and makes you feel safe betting that she’ll be far more than a one-album wonder. Sometimes when albums garner seemingly endless praise - especially first efforts - it’s tempting to see it as little more than hyperbole, but with The ArchAndroid, Janelle Monáe has displayed that the excitement is entirely justified.