Elephant Shell Tokyo Police Club (CD)
Canadian rockers Tokyo Police Club should be arrested for producing what is arguably one of the year's most boring albums.
Their debut album Elephant Shell is a two-disc collection of 19 songs, each of which lasts about two minutes. The biggest problem is the band's tendency to use unnecessarily challenging language in their lyrics.
Take, for example, the line 'Broken hearts tessellate'. Why not just say 'Broken hearts fit together'?
Vocabulary criticisms over with, Tokyo Police Club's music is best described as post-punk pop that features some very good keyboard work with musically-solid bass and guitar playing.
But the music is let down by lead singer Dave Monk's nasal and monotonous voice that becomes annoying only three tracks into the CD.
His singing style makes every song sound the same, and it takes a real effort to understand what he's saying. This is a hard CD to recommend: the music is actually fairly interesting, but Monk's singing is really off-putting.
If you want to hear incoherent lyrics successfully babbled, buy an old Nirvana album. Kurt Cobain did a much better job.
