Albums of the 2010s - 2010 - Two Door Cinema Club's Tourist History

today's meme courtesy of the wonderful @lilscrobbler

I tried to write the football post, I really did, but suffice to say, in the words of countless players of the game, "I'm just not enjoying my football at the moment." The game has reached an astonishingly low ebb both morally and in terms of "watching Crystal Palace at the moment makes me suicidal even if we win", so trying to write about what fandom means to me was coming out a lot more bitter than I meant it to. I'll write that bitter post in due course, and maybe once I'm allowed in stadiums again I'll remember what makes the sport good.

this, but they're BOTH all that's wrong with the world

Instead, I will change tack completely and go on a long run of posts devoted to tracing the arc of 2010s music through what I was listening to at the time. You know I love a good fucking arc. The arc between usenet and Instagram. The arc between R.E.M signing to a major and Drive Like Jehu somehow doing the same. And now, the arc that took us from Tourist History to whatever I decide is the album of 2020. This is a weird sort of series in that the earlier posts will likely be the more interesting ones, because there's more of a gap between a) what I was listening to in 2010 and what I listen to now, and b) where the critical and commercial winds were blowing in 2010 and where they're blowing now.

I was prompted to do this album first by an argument I saw on the indie subreddit (I promise I don't go there normally, I just wanted to see an AMA from Steve Hyden and Ian Cohen - I love Hyden especially so much that this is slyly just a ripoff of the unparalleled Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation?) - what's the last big rock riff that got famous? Someone suggested 'What You Know' by Two Door Cinema Club. That's not correct - it's either the bass riff to 'The Less I Know The Better', or 'Do I Wanna Know' if only lead guitar is allowed - but it made me think about how learning that twinkly TDCC riff ten years ago was the same kind of rite of passage for me as learning 'Seven Nation Army', 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', or  'Smoke On The Water' had been for generations previous. The album it's taken from, of course, fits neatly into the course I want to chart for music in the 2010s too.

You actually already know where we are in 2010 from an earlier piece, sort of. The New Rock Revolution (e.g. the Strokes) had been done for a long time, as had the post-punk revival (e.g. Bloc Party) that followed it, and we were left with what people disparagingly call "landfill indie" (e.g. the Maccabees). Two Door Cinema Club feel like the dying embers of that strain of music, even as they almost of point to where stuff would go.

Some background on the band themselves. Apparently they started to get on a Northern Irish TV show for bands, and came in last place, which is quite funny considering I've never heard of any of the bands that have won. They were called LifeWithoutRory then, a suitably MySpace-y name, camel case and all, considering this was 2007. They reformed later that year, sans drummer, and renamed themselves after a mistaken pronunciation of the local Tudor Cinema Club. Their drummerless-ness is, I think, the main component of their sound - they have a live drummer, or at least they did when I went to see them in (fuck me, man) 2013, but the frenetic, impossible-to-play-with-four-limbs drum machine/computer beats on Tourist History are, to my mind, the point. Furthermore, it moved them one step closer to the dancier stuff that was going on in English 'guitar music' at the turn of the decade. 

Yes, "dance-punk" was the order of the day circa 2005, but these were bands ripping off XTC, A Certain Ratio and Josef K, guitar-heavy, almost funky bands, rather than the synthpop of, say, New Order or the Human League. By 2010 you had bands like Foals, whose herky-jerky guitar lines sound like a massive influence on Two Door to me, making mixtapes that proved they were actually super into, like, African stuff, and Bibio, and Nicholas Jaar, not the Libertines and certainly not Oasis. You have the remarkably prolific Bombay Bicycle Club moving from pure, perfect landfill pop on I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose in 2009 to Banhartian campfire singalongs on Flaws in 2010 (which I could've written about here too, in fairness) to eclectic, synths-'n'-samples 'world' music a la Yeasayer or Merriweather-era Animal Collective on A Different Kind Of Fix in 2011 (produced by Animal Collective's guy too), going through an entire kid's musical adolescence in the space of two years. And you have the little flareups of synthpop revivalism, more electronic than that earlier Killers-led wave, that scattered themselves around that Global Financial Crisis era; your La Rouxses, your Hot Chips (and lies?), your Metronomies. This is the milieu Two Door Cinema Club found themselves in, and I think they manage to bridge the gap between the indie disco and the actual disco pretty well. They were on Kitsuné - a French electronic label - and not, say, Stiff or Rough Trade for a reason.

Relistening to this nine years removed from when I first did, I completely understand why I liked it. I think this is an Ian Cohen-ism, (edit: it is) but the stuff I rated when I was eleven, like Two Door and Kings of Leon, embarrass me less than the stuff I liked three or four years ago - I seriously enjoyed Brockhampton for a little while back there, fucking hell. The songs are tight, well produced, and even dancier than I remember. I felt betrayed in 2016 when their third album was ENTIRELY disco but that's now very funny to me because they're 90% of the way there already on Tourist History. "I Can Talk" could, with a more bombastic singer (Alex Trimble is a lovely, polite singer whose only real vocal quirk is 'being from Bangor' - this is why he was perfect for the Closing Ceremony of the London Olympics back in 2012), easily pass for New, Post-Hiatus Fall Out Boy/Panic! with that overdramatic, poppy vibe that teenage girls adore. "Eat That Up, It's Good For You" pretty much has a drop, like any of the countless 'brostep' bangers that were about to cross over in the next couple of years, and "Something Good Can Work" hits this chill vibe that points the way to tropical house, the drum machines pushing out a busy little dembow and Sam Halliday letting his guitar sit atop everything with basically 0 effects, almost like an unprocessed sine wave. 

That guitar sound pops up a lot on this album, and it's not a lead sound I can pinpoint anywhere else other than maybe Foals' Antidotes. It's obviously not big, Clapton-or-Hendrix worshipping capital R-G Rock Guitar, but it's also not like the guitar-as-textural-element style championed by people like The Edge, Johnny Marr, or Kevin Shields, who became guitar anti-heroes for the indie kids just as Jimmy Page or Brian May are regular guitar heroes to the rockers. Sam Halliday's lead sound is just a guitar, any single-coil Fender will do, maybe an overdrive (I'm hearing a tiny bit of drive on "What You Know", tone and drive knobs way down, though), but otherwise straight into a clean amp. As much as Brian Eno would like you to think "Soon" killed guitar, that's a sound that countless musicians (including me lol) have been chasing the last 30 years, on guitar. No one's trying to sound like Halliday, it'd be like trying to taste like water or feel like air. That's honestly quite inspiring to me. He created a very distinct guitar tone for the group by not creating a distinct guitar tone at all (Trimble plays rhythm guitar too, quite well, I might add, but his sounds more like a normal rhythm guitar in that Josef K/Franz Ferdinand mould I mentioned earlier).

"What You Know" stills stands out as The Big Single. Big, big chorus, some excellent work in the verses from bassist Kevin Baird, who I haven't mentioned yet but whose lines are key to making Tourist History feel like a proper dance album with a bit of (but not too much) funk, and that indelible noodle up top. I still don't feel comfortable calling it a riff - too rockist, this ain't Led Zep or even the Black Keys - nor an anti-riff - feels like it should be saved for things that are low-key still heavy riffs like "Only Shallow" or "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" or "How Soon Is Now?" - so noodle will have to do. As good as the chorus melody is, that guitar noodle is the thing that you'll hear British kids belt out drunkenly in unison like monks rushing through booze-fueled plainsong, the way we do with "Chelsea Dagger" or "Seven Nation Army". If you're not familiar with this style of singing, which you might not be if you've never been outside, it sounds something like this: 

If that was the only reason I was writing about it - "hey check out this fuckin' tune" - that would be enough. But you know I need my sweet, sweet arcs, man, and this fits into two. Let's talk advertcore first.

Advertcore, in case it isn't clear, is "the kind of music that gets put in adverts". It's not an actual genre, because it changes year on year and depends on what is being sold, but we are definitely beyond the time when companies had "jingles" and such like. One of the many things wrong with Two And A Half Men was Charlie Sheen made his money as a 'jingle guy', like any brand has had a jingle since 2002. Here's Orange using that Banhart fellow I mentioned in like 2004.

Here's some similarly quirkly, weirdly accented music for the iPod in 2008, 

and by 2011, this is the accepted method by which indie bands make money, so TDCC soundtrack a Debenhams with the sunny number "This Is The Life"  

and I distinctly remember that airing at the same time as forgotten indie kid Darwin Deez's spot for New Look. 

 

It's hard to overstate the extent to which this is THE play for an "indie" band in the 2010s; consider how the biggest most successful groups, your American Authorses, your Imagined Dragons, your Portugal. The Men (make sure you stop that loading quickly to bypass the paywall), all had big hits off big ad placements. Look, here's an Imagine Dragons song that sounds like an American Authors song being used to whitewash the third biggest company on the planet!

Two Door were no different; there's the Debenham ads up there, but "I Can Talk" was on the FIFA soundtrack, "Undercover Martyn" on Gran Turismo, and "What You Know" soundtracks a 2012 outlook.com commercial, as well as some Indonesian ramen ads, apparently! So that's one arc covered: indie bands don't make money off, like, album sales or gigging - these guys don't even have a drummer, gigging is not the priority - the play is what music industry people call 'syncing' or licencing. The other is another Cohenism: 0 years signify the end of the previous decade, not the beginning of the new one. 

This is technically true on the nerd level; there's always some prick, probably Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is all to pleased to note that decades/centuries/millennia, don't start until xxx1, not xxx0, but Cohen means it on a cultural level. Kid A (2000) is the culmination of the threads running through the Nineties, just as Déja Vu (1970) represents the culmination of the attitudes and musical trends of the Sixties. Tourist History, therefore, represents the culmination of the Noughties, the closing of a book, not another opening. Contemporary reviews seem to skew towards "nice debut, lot of promise, wonder where they'll go next", not realising that the direction of indie was not to be charted by Two Door Cinema Club at all. As always, focus shifted away from these weird provincial outposts like Bangor, a small tourist trap (hence the album title!) outside Belfast, and toward the capital. I don't want to give it all away, but 2009's xx and 2011's James Blake are much more obvious signposts to how things would sound, both in and out of the mainstream, in the coming decade than Two Door's admittedly deft melding of electronic and indie rock. When I said no one was trying to sound like Sam Halliday, I meant it, but there's less distance between his dry doodling over the beat and Romy Madley-Croft's (and I guess Baria Qureshi's) work in the XX than you may assume.

As goodbyes go, Tourist History functions quite solidly as a farewell to the kind of music British kids were making in the 2000s, but it dispels some notions too. I think the cool tastemakers at places like the Guardian and Pitchfork think that everyone spent eight years trying to sound like the Libertines until, I don't know, Beyoncé? Frank Ocean? came and saved us from boring white boy music. I think actually listening to, like, "What A Waster" and "Do You Want It All?" in succession proves this wrong. There's plenty of evolution within those ten-ish years. What actually makes Tourist History such an anachronism is its busyness. There's constantly shit happening, in those crazy drum beats, in those mazy "riffs", the sheer number of words Alex tries to fit in ("Let's make this happen, girl, weregonnashowtheworldthatsomethinggoodcanworkanditcouldworkfor yoouuuuu"). What the XX, James Blake, et al push is space and minimalism - Bombay Bicycle Club's maximalism went down well for a time, but even Foals, TDCC's big influence, would move into more subdued territory on 2010's Total Life Forever, and basically stay there all decade. Not, to my mind, until Black Midi's Schlagenheim in 2019 (and outside of British rock, 1000 gecs) were critics fine with far too much happening on an album once again.

The other thing is Foals are basically the only rock band that still exists in the United Kingdom. I don't think most of the interesting stuff of the previous decade was happening here - of the next ten albums I intend to cover, I don't think I intend to cover another English act again (that's right, no James Blake despite how much I sucked him off in that last paragraph, but he does loom large) - and of the three big groups, you have the aforementioned Foals; the Arctic Monkeys, who have over their last three albums reinvented themselves as sunkissed jangle pop, Drake with a guitar, and space lounge music, respectively; and the 1975, who I despise with a passion. As for Two Door themselves, 2012's Beacon was more of the same, and by 2016's Gameshow I'd tuned out completely. I got that first single, "Are We Ready?" as a Spotify advert, and was thoroughly repulsed. I think, like I said, music reviewers expected more from them, but really, this is about as well as anyone could've expected them to do given the climate. As mentioned, Alex Trimble sang at the Olympics! That's pretty good, right? Something good can work, just not forever. Unfortunately, the music world was changing, and there was no longer space for this kind of band, replete with guitars and nervous energy. Not a value judgement, I'm just tracing the arc. There wasn't space for much more Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by 1980, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Music just had to go elsewhere. So do we. We're off to Harlem next time, help me French braid my hair, bring your most expensive clobber, and as many acid tabs as you can carry: we're getting lit.

2010 - Honourable Mentions

Darwin Deez - Mac deMarc-who? Boy Pablo which?? Homeshake whom'st'd've???You want that ramshackle, jangly, "jizz jazz" sound? This is the album, man. He even played all those tasty jazz chords on a weirdly tuned four string Fender Mustang, making it impossible for 12-year-old me to copy any of this shit without ruining the only thing of value I owned (hell, that's still true).

Kanye West - My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy - obviously very influential on the shape of rap to come, but I don't have any strong feelings on the album, so I couldn't write about it. Classic "Seinfeld Is Unfunny" in that Kanye is so important to the next ten years of rap that I heard first , that the album that spawned it all does not affect me in the slightest.

Earl Sweatshirt - Earl - I'm not doing an Odd Future album as part of these rundowns, and that feels like a massive oversight. I wasn't listening to rap at the time - firmly in my Two Door/KoL/ Foos phase for the next couple of years - but I can see in contemporary reviews that people really felt the genre was in kind of a rut until this year, and Odd Future's abrasive, violent, horrible, hardcore punk-ish (in ethos, not sound, they obviously SOUNDED like the Neptunes, but all fucked up) work was a big, if divisive, part of that renaissance. Earl was tagged as the most gifted rapper of the crew, and we can see how that turned out, but 

Kings of Leon - Come Around Sundown - The American equivalent of Tourist History, narrative-wise. Just as our decade began with garage rock held together by sticky tape and alcohol, Kings Of Leon started off as coked-up preacher's kids out to cause some fuckeries and ended up making very listenable yacht rock that sold very respectably on this album. Wild shit.

Waka Flocka Flame - Flockaveli - Simultaneously feels like the end of crunk ("No Hands") and the beginning of drill ("Hard in The Paint") in one project. Is this what saved rap or what rap needed saving from? I don't know, but there's a straight line from Waka's career to: Young Thug originally being signed (same label), paving the way for most of the last seven years of hip-hop; Sydney's realest here (trap -> Chicago drill -> UK drill -> Australia, somehow); and the *attitude* of half those modern rappers -- Waka hates his own rapping, he just wanted to get rich, and he now spends his time raising his family and advocating for mental health after his brother's tragic suicide. Not a bad legacy considering he's literally not arsed in the slightest about leaving a legacy.

Beach House - Teen Dream - I don't know if Beach House are influential, per se, but they're a rare constant presence in an otherwise difficult decade to remain relevant. Every two years or so, they release some quality dream-pop, and honestly, that's impressive enough. Plus, the depressed kids love Beach House, and the depressed kids ran shit this decade.

Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More - technically released in 2009 over here, but a) 2010 in the States, and 2) too important to that early 2010s folkie revival to not talk about. Don't let people forget that the Lumineers and them were super popular.