Two Door Cinema Club – What You Know
It’s all over Radio 1 for some reason, it’s…
[Video][Website]
[4.50]
Anthony Easton: Why do I read this as ever so slightly misogynist? It’s obviously a jangly, unskilled attempt to merge the more annoying elements of the New Pornographers and Vampire Weekend, which means it gets dismissed out of hand, but the whole thing has an “I know better than you” skeezy bar pick up element to it.
[2]
Alex Ostroff: A series of interlocking moving parts. Drums, bass, lead guitar, driving forward in perpetual motion. The kinetic energy recalls Bloc Party and the post-punk class of 2005, but where Kele worked against and in between the instruments, Two Door Cinema Club’s vocalist floats atop it all cheerily, neither pushing nor pulling. The dance-punk bassline and occasional Latin percussion are pleasant, but there’s no urgency here. I’m genuinely curious where this stuff (well-produced, polished, pleasantly wallpapery indie rock) fits into the UK pop scene, since there seems to be so much of it.
[5]
Martin Skidmore: This Irish indie band make a reasonable stab at integrating electronica with the usual indie sound, and it runs along perkily enough, with a tolerable singer. I guess it’s unusual enough for an indie act to not offend me in some way, but I’m not sure that ‘inoffensive’ is really what anyone aspires to.
[4]
Chuck Eddy: Even for anemic electro-indie wimpdom, this sounds unusually dime-a-dozen.
[2]
Iain Mew: Like Ben Gibbard fronting a less funky Friendly Fires, doing a cover of “My Delirium”. Which, even if you like those things, makes this inessential at best.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: Some things just aren’t worth resisting: surf-guitar doodles, beats that sound like they’ve been assembled from the footsteps of pinball machines in a race, choruses that flail out for companionship and juuuust grasp it. Shame about that ghastly last note; good thing I can skip back to the start long before it arrives.
[7]
John Seroff: There’s more than a whiff of both one hit wonder and of The Killers going on in “What You Know”, and that mix of easy-on-the-ears Britpop familiarity, two killer guitar hooks and genuinely enjoyable lead vocals should keep Two Door Cinema Club on American radio through Spring. They’ll certainly stay on my own mix at least that long; dozens of listens have proven it, meaningless lyrics notwithstanding, to be a real, toe-tapping keeper.
[9]
Mallory O’Donnell: Is 2004 the new 1998? Stay tuned…
[4]