Tokyo Police Club – Forcefield

‘Forcefield’ may as well be titled ‘curveball’: anyone expecting the brash, hyperactive, “your English is good!”-yelling Tokyo Police Club of yore is best looking away immediately. This, the Canadian quartet’s third full length (ignoring 2011’s ‘Ten Songs…’ covers project) just isn’t that band.

At a guess, bar playing other people’s songs, since the release of 2010’s ‘Champ’, the Ontario gang have been hard at work listening to a lot of Phoenix alongside honing their skills. Because much of ‘Forcefield’ sounds just like it could’ve been made by Thomas Mars and pals. And it’s really, really good.

What they’ve not lost from the old days is the ability to write a hook: whether it’s ‘Feel The Effect’ and its repetition of the title, or the brilliantly paced ‘Gonna Be Ready’ and its “upset / incredible headache / how bad / I’m calling a medic” that reads like it shouldn’t work but does so effortlessly; ‘Forcefield’ is full of them. Like, yes, Phoenix, or when Mystery Jets dropped the pots and pans and picked up those 80s-tastic synths, these are pop hits of the arena-filling kind. Literally: they’d fit right in next to Two Door Cinema Club’s O2-baiting radio staples.

Yes, there’s still the odd nod to The Cribs’ guitar sounds, or the punk-ish intros to both ‘Tunnel Vision’ and ‘Gonna Be Ready’, but the former breaks down quickly enough in to something that’d fit in perfectly on The Strokes’ ‘Comedown Machine’, while there’s even a hint of showtunes on the piano-led ‘Through The Wire’. Even a track called ‘Toy Guns’ sounds impressively grown-up. Opener ‘Argentina’ lasts eight minutes.

So while fans of the band’s more lo-fi beginnings may stare, open-mouthed, bemused at the central role played by synths on ‘Forcefield’, there’s every chance they’ll be gaining a whole slew of newbies, should these many choruses be set loose.