Elephant Shell trumpets unique sound

Debut presents modest album that shines with quirky individuality.

By Kelsey Whipple

Published April 22, 2008

Tokyo Police Club has lost some things. Since the Canadian band's much-blogged EP, the four guys have lost the jerky, jarring guitar riffs that made them screenworthy ­— only to have found that they didn't really need them.

They've lost the sense of novelty that came along with it — but they've replaced that with identity. They've lost brevity, though an album under the 30-minute mark is hardly an epic. They've lost time — it took nearly two years for the guys to release a full-length. It's refreshing, then, that they haven't lost focus.

If the band that shouted, "Operator, give me the president of the world!" has changed, it was only in order to mature and further develop A Lesson In Crime's fertile vein of self-sustainable garage rock.

This time around, the efforts are accompanied by better motives and a smaller debt to hype.

Elephant Shell brings with it a band still at the pleasant stage of pursuing only what their simple appetites require, their debut plainly aimed at developing a distinct voice. They don't reach too far, and the results are far-reaching — fat free, unaffected guitar pop tucked under the expansive cloak of personable indie rock. For TPC, this is business as usual.

Current single "Your English Is Good" is the first sign of the band's impressive lyrical instincts, its lines drifting fluidly from punch chorus to sentimental verses.

Lead singer Dave Monks' lilting vocals rush in and out over lines like, "So we search for you by night/... Injustice is my middle name/Cause you don't need to change/The future's with us." Foregrounded in lukewarm guitar and animated by nimble keyboards, the lines betray the typically TPC lyrical bent of clever modesty. They aren't complicated, and they don't have to be.

Elephant Shell's maturation is twofold, found throughout the 11 songs in cleaner lyrics and tighter guitar riffs.

Although there isn't an obvious single, the album is still an obvious whole, its songs occasionally blighted by nostalgia and almost always blurred by pulls to the dance floor.

The goals here are: 1) release an album and 2) get the girl, in that order, and where some bands might overindulge that simplicity, TPC accent it.

Only one song breaks the three-minute mark.

Monks' tragically hip voice plays like a bastardized Julian Casablancas, its endearing nasality one of a handful of leftovers from A Lesson In Crime. It's a voice made for lines like "You've been famous since your birth" ("Listen to the Math"). "In A Cave" betrays the evidence of two years spent well, its straightforward rhythm dissolving into a legitimately starry-eyed refrain.

"Tessellate"'s repressed keyboard pop is laced with enough abjectly lovely sentiment to make its thesaurus-friendly lyrics more adorable than annoying. Still, "Dead lovers salivate/Broken hearts tessellate" makes for a quirky couplet.

In a year already dominated by bands like Los Campesinos! and Vampire Weekend, Tokyo Police Club is another band with the guts to be significant. And at the moment, that's a good place to be.