Tokyo Police Club @ The Other Rooms 11/06/08

No they are not from Japan, they are from Canada, you should know this if you have been on wikipedia and have read about this band. Tokyo Police Club is a band with four rather young members. Three are 21 and one is 23, and they make music that is worth going down in rock history.
For me this gig in Newcastle was the second time that I have seen them. I must say Tokyo Police Club or TPC have progressed loads since the 16th of February 2006. Elephant Shell their debut album was released this spring, providing fans with music that by far excelled the material found on the EP (treated like and album, but not being one) A Lesson In Crime. But I am meant to write about the gig and not about their records. By now I am late writing about the gig, I am sorry about that, but sometimes I feel the need of these things settling in my memory before I produce them on paper.Dave, Graham, Greg and Josh were on their last week of a 61-gig tour, but they still had more energy than most bands have these days. Their music is ‘demanding’, I am not sure if it is the right word that should be used, it is different from the other things that are out there. Not only their music is different, the lyrics are different. It was really too bad that there was a problem with Dave’s microphone, so on a few songs his beautiful voice was drowned out by the instruments.Your English Is Good and/or Tessellate and other songs had the whole of the public singing along. Some songs are there to be clapped to, in those cases the whole venue was clapping. There was no encore given by TPC, there was no need for one, the set was finished of in the certain harmony you want it to finish. If they would have played one more song they might have collapsed.
TPC brought with them the newest New York revelation Mobius Band for the European part of the tour. For a couple of months I had known one of their songs Hallie and I thought that it would be cool to see them live. I did not think they would be coming to the UK any time soon (allow some pessimism) and well the last thing that I though was that they would be the support band for one of my favorite bands.These three Brooklyn natives are a rather geeky bunch they know how to charm their public. In the beginning of their set everyone in the crowd kept the ‘obligatory’ distance to the stage. Mobius (I permit myself to shorten it to that) did not seem to like it, one of them more or less told us off and said that we should be filling the space right in front of the stage.I believe that with them it is interesting to see where they are going to be in a couple of weeks or months or years time. There is something very special about them, a momentum seems to be building up around them in the States, if the wave will hit Europe remains a yet unanswered question.
A year ago or so Tokyo Police Club would play their gig with only 10 songs, all they had in stock back then. Now their set list is miles long written on a paper plate and not including every release they have had so far. I believe I might have gotten a bit carried away with this review, but good music can sometimes hardly be described in a couple of words.

Review by Solveig Werner