Tuesday 23 March 2010

Two Door Cinema Club - Tourist History

When at school, you are taught to write 'correctly'. You are told to use appropriate adjectives to describe whatever you are describing. You are told to avoiding 'describing words' such as 'alright', 'fine', 'nice' and even 'lovely'. You are taught to write more deeply, to be more eloquent. You see, thats the problem..

Any music fan claiming to be 'indie' or 'cool' will have been myspace-ing 'Two Door Cinema Club' for a while now. Any music fan not claiming to be part of the afore mentioned trends may have myspaced them, but have probably been shouting about them less loudly, and less often.

As far as albums go, 'Tourist History' hasn't been the most eagerly awaited. It was thrown out into the music world, surfing an indie guitar wave. Unfortunately, that wave died down a few years ago, along with 'One Night Only', 'Kooks (who?)' and 'We play guitars and have fringes, can we come in please?'.

The few singles that have been released have met mediocre reception, and are... 'alright'. 'I Can Talk', 'Something Good Can Work' and, the latest one, 'Undercover Martyn' have all come and gone with little impact made. I'll be honest, the only reason i bought this album was because it was a fiver on iTunes and I had some spare credit to use up. Financially, this was the better value album. (I'm not recommending you buy all of your albums this way, you might end up with Robbie's new album.) Ok, it wasn't the only reason..

Cast your, probable teenage, minds back a few years. The years before keyboards were cool again. The years keyboards were really uncool. Circa 2005. La Roux hadn't even thought about a quiff, Lady Gaga was wondering that if she put a telephone on her head people would notice her more, and Justin Bieber wasn't even born. We had guitars. And it was great. No keyboards, just guitars. Obviously thats all changed now, and unless your voice has been mechanically altered by Kanye West, no one wants to hear you.

Thats why, to a certain extent, TDCC are fresh. A renaissance of indie-guitar. And thats...urghh.. 'fine'. But the problem is, they're not very interesting. We've forgotten why we don't have indie guitar anymore. Its because Franz killed it with their first couple of albums. It's boring now, and so are TDCC (incidentally, Franz are not).

Tourist History is nice. There's no other way of describing it. The songs are nice. They are entertaining to listen to (a couple of times), might even have you dancing (briefly) and it gives us a simple break from the god-awful indie-keyboard shite that's getting thrown around at the moment. It doesn't do an awful lot, and it won't affect you deeply, but you might just have an enjoyable time listening to it. Umm... Lovely.

Rating: 5/10

Top Three Songs:
1. 'Undercover Martyn'
2. 'What You Know'
3. You'll probably be getting a bit fed up with them by now.