That's Why It's Called A Police Club

I saw Tokyo Police club at the Troubadour the other night. Great band. Perfect name. If you don't know them already, think Television if they stomped harder and bounced shamelessly. Although, to be fair, they could've never heard of Television and ended up making the same music. When I first heard of them, the name struck me as hipster irony and the music struck me as being what I always had hoped The Strokes would evolve into.
---
Neither of these was accurate. Let’s start with the name and work our way back to why this band is great rock and roll as opposed to an imitation of great rock and roll. Police Club sounds like a joke, a hyperstacked inverse oxymoron that covers a couple of levels of order. The fashionable club in a fascist institution. They're from Newmarket, Ontario; and thus the Japanese city appended to the front comes off as a joke. On one level it is. However, when you realize that their first EP, "A Lesson In Crime" is actually threaded together under the narrative auspices of a robot takeover that happens in 2009, it makes sense that they'd take the name of a cultural capital associated with brining the terrifying sci-fi aspects of futurist consumerism into the present.

Jump to their concert. Three loud fucks beside of me are raising their glasses to their digital cameras like its heaven. One is cute, one thinks of the cute one as a sidekick, the guy is slightly too high grade of steakhead to be taking them seriously, but he's enjoying the ride. They're at a "happening" indie rock show cause it's fashionable without bothering to really dress the part. If you're gonna stick your taint in my face at least do it while you wear American Apparel. Every word is wrapped around an old school "Oh My God" so it rises and falls like an abject chirp. They scream something about robots intermittently. They've spent more on drinks than I made at work that day. I don't know if they actually seized on the robot motif or if it's just another lame meme like zombie ninjas fuck-fighting werewolves on a pirate ship.

However, my innate venom aside, we're all here an enjoying the same band. We're picking up on the same currents, whether we mean it or not. Tokyo Police Club's appeal derives from the same authoritarian motifs that surface in their name. Shouty backing vocals. Invitations to clap along. Moments you hum for days. However, these same motifs end up subverted in consistently interesting ways. For instance, at one point on "A Lesson in Crime" handclaps are actually used to suggest the march of a robot army.

Music starts, these guys have gotten better since the last time I saw them. Confidence, precision, and a more earned swagger from the guitarist. Singer is on point, makes all the melodies seem natural. This is a band that knows how to serve the song first and themselves second. Their latest LP, "Elephant Shell," due in a few weeks confirms this. Guitar tones are less barbed, keyboard feels more like champagne. Bubbles and waves. Not as much like an unfinished pot of coffee percolating in accidental heat. Lyrics have both more economy and more depth.

As far as performance, everyone is great. The keyboard player, in particular, is amazing. He looks more like a blogosphere refugee than an archetypical rockstar. He's manic, often airborne. Every lesson you never listened to about white people dancing, you can see here. The keyboard on either side almost seems to be fencing him in, backing him into a corner. He plays like he's defusing a bomb but somehow yields effortlessly compelling hooks and melodies. When he throws in backing vocals, you can hear his voice shred, lending an edge of anguish to proceedings, ironic because the shout along parts of the band's songs aesthetically evoke sports cheers, making them almost perfectly opposed to any kind of angst. As with the aforementioned handclaps, an authoritarian motif shows up, draws everyone in, and then gets subverted. Fucking brilliant
---
"Your English Is Good" was my favorite song of last year, maybe rivaled by LCD's "All My Friends" but somehow more connected to eternity. It came out on a 7", which made it harder to push as any kind of archetypical example. Fortunately, it shows up on "Elephant Shell," kicking off the third act of a stellar album. They play it tonight, and it sums up everything I love about the band while also revealing nearly everything that makes them interesting. The rhythm is this kind of 1-2 1-2 1-2 1-2 thing that reminds me of an unremitting pencil tapping a desk in a post lunch lull. Fidgety, but worn into consistency. Everyone shouts, like they're rallying for hegemony (or wailing as the screws get deeper in the flesh of everyone who won't go along):

Give us your vote!
Give us your vote!
If you know, what's good for you!

It fits with the robot motif, summoning the audience to mechanically clap along even as it backhands the notion that anything is even worth voting for. The guitarist and keyboard player take up tambourines, leaving the bass, drums and vocals to carry the opening. We're all on the same page, all rooting for the same lost cause, even though we don't know what it is. That's when the rest of the band jumps in, rapturous but precise. Just as a pit comes to fruition, things settle down for the verse:

These are the lines
That we straighten every year
But it's the second time
They mapped the constellations
So we search for you by night
In the Deptford Gravel Pit
The tale of tramp finds Christ
Injustice is my middle name

I could explain these ten different ways and still come up short of the feeling they create. Hell, I couldn't even tell you whose perspective they're from. Some elements are at play though. Aesthetic militarization, straight lines, dark places, exhaustion. Something lost in a misunderstood trade. A cross or a crossroads.

My office building is across the street from another building, which has a row of flags from various nations across its facade. Back when I would go out there to smoke, the rusty taste of the cigarette would bite me back for killing myself a little every day as I listened to this song and watched the rush of air funneled between buildings tousle the flags. I felt, and even more so now feel, a kinship with this song. When I listen to it on the bus, the LCD monitors broadcast news in both Spanish and English. I don't know if it could have been written ten years ago because, while we talked a good game about everything that makes it feel so great right now, we didn't understand the game yet.

You don't need to change
Your future's with us

I looped this song back in August while cutting my hair for a job interview. Re-learning how to be an adult, pumping the volume and dodging the wires as I culled stray hairs with a borrowed set of clippers.

Your English is good
We can see it in your bones

In the chorus, when everyone shouts along, it works as both an affirmation of and an indictment of the dominant order. When the line follows, it's like watching the nature-nurture debate piss itself in protest. Maybe none of this was intended, but given that 1/6 of Newmarket's population immigrated to Canada from other places, its miles from being a happy accident that this particular song approaches cultural assimilation with both so much empathy and so much cynicism. This band has tuned into something profound:

You look a wreck,
Left your key inside the door
And my rook will check
Across this black and white chessboard

It's a more concise statement of the first verse, half the words and twice the impact. All the motifs are there. Crosses, lines, games, aesthetic binaries, exhaustion. There's a weary but wry inevitability to the whole thing, combined with a hope that maybe everything can be affirming instead of crushing which is precisely why this band and this song in particular are so essential. Whether they know it or not, they've spun together a whole post-teen cosmology that manages to feel entirely familiar and friendly, lived in in the best way possible, while having an effortless depth that keeps any of it from feeling academic. Like Elvis Costello, they work just as well in an apolitical context, but manage to feel righteous and collective in the way that great political music does. I love this band as much because it invites analysis and exists so comfortably at such a high level of craft as much as I love it for being musically generous enough to even encompass people I can't stand.