Be a champ

The members of Tokyo Police Club have grown up tremendously since their first EP release in 2006 and their music is following suit

With a Juno nomination for Alternative Album of the Year
Image supplied by: Supplied
With a Juno nomination for Alternative Album of the Year

Despite the implication in the moniker, Tokyo Police Club is a rock band from the Toronto area. Keyboardist/percussionist Graham Wright, spoke with the Journal before the band’s upcoming show in Kingston on March 30 at Ale House.

Tokyo Police Club released their debut EP, A Lesson In Crime, in 2006. At that time there was no shortage of blog buzz to go around for aspiring artists with a Myspace page and the right sound. The spiky and infectious garage rock instantly found favor in the online hype cycle.

Five years later and with their second full-length album entitled Champ released, Tokyo Police Club have outlasted many shorter-lived acts that came into the public’s awareness during the Internet era. Wright attributes the band’s relative longevity to a reliance on traditional methods alongside online publicity.

“At the beginning we had some success in that area, but when our next record came out most people were over it,” he said. “In the meantime we toured, played shows and built a fan base that way.”

Another reason the band wasn’t buried under the weight of blog posts in the wake of their initial success, is that their sound developed naturally over time. Instead of pushing an attempt to reach a wider audience or continuing to record the same sound over again, they’ve grown gracefully into a distinctive style of indie rock.

“I can tell you a lot more about who we were trying to rip off when we first started. Now it’s more subconscious,” Wright said speaking to the band’s progress and influences.

Clocking in at a brisk 16-minutes, the first EP maintained a high level of energy throughout and the band found a strength in brevity. The song craft was informed by the early 2000s garage revival led by The Strokes and The White Stripes, while the lyrics were delivered with youthful exuberance and tinged with science fiction themes about robots, experiments and the future.

On Champ, the group isn’t so much looking forward to a strange and fantastic future, but reflecting back on life and family with honest impressions.

“It’s going to happen,” Wright said. “You’re going to write different songs when you’re 19 versus 24. We’re constantly growing up and maturing.”

In many ways, this is a yardstick for determining a young band’s quality. If the listener can sense an artist’s gradual maturation over time, communication between musicians and fans becomes more interactive and real.

Of course, sometimes a certain project must remain constant in order to function properly. For example, Daytrotter, a website that uses off-the-cuff recording techniques to capture bands and makes the recordings available for download, have recorded Tokyo Police Club twice. They first played Daytrotter around 2007, then again in support of Champ in late 2010.

“Daytrotter has stayed wonderfully the same, their thing is their thing,” said Wright. The difference between the two performances lies in the evolution of the band, and not in a change of the Daytrotter approach.

“We were more inclined to embrace everything that’s good about Daytrotter the first time around,” he said. “We were just a little younger, less set in our ways, so we would dig in the cupboard and pull out some old keyboard and just use that. I think we made up some alternative version of a song and played it on the spot.”

He said that on their second visit to Daytrotter they were less spontaneous.

“It was not quite the same free-for-all,” a fact that’s indicative of their direction. On their first album, 2008’s Elephant Shell, and even more so on Champ, the band scraped away much of the lo-fi aesthetic while retaining the personality that made their early work so charming. Rob Schnaff, who has worked with Beck and Elliott Smith, is behind the mixing board on Champ and provides the clean production to complement the tighter and more robust songwriting.

A clear signifier of their solidified achievement is a Juno nomination for Alternative Album of the Year.

“We’ve never been to the Juno Awards ceremony before so we’re going to get all suited up and go have a good time,” Wright said.

Tokyo Police Club is up against Arcade Fire for the award, the indie band from Montréal who shocked the music world when they trumped the likes of Lady Gaga and Eminem to win the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Wright doesn’t think this means that the doors to the mainstream will be more open to independent artists in the future. In fact, he said, “I think that’s already happened. It’s not like [Arcade Fire] is some tiny band, they’re already huge and didn’t need the Grammys. It’s been like that for a few years now, it doesn’t matter if you’re a band from Canada or Katy Perry.”

Tokyo Police Club play Ale House on Wednesday March 30 with Dinosaur Bones and Hollerado at 9 p.m.

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