Does 2019 offer a more baffling musical phenomenon than the continued success of what you might call second-wave noughties indie? Not the bands that erupted into the public consciousness at the start of the decade, with their huge hit singles and era-defining albums and identifiable images eagerly co-opted by fans – Coldplay, the Killers, the Libertines et al – but the ones who came five years later, damned as “landfill indie”, so nondescript you imagined them convening for rehearsals and peering puzzled at their bandmates: “Sorry, do I know you?”
These are, after all, widely held to be thin times indeed for the kind of mainstream alt-rock that was once the NME’s lifeblood: the one thing noticeable by its absence on the main stage at this year’s Glastonbury is a hot young guitar band, catapulted to fame on a firework trajectory by overheated media attention, including at least one front cover that excitedly claims “THIS BAND WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE”. Over on the Radio 1 playlist, the Amazons offer a solitary, exception-that-proves-the-rule hold-out, swamped by hip-hop, grime and pop. Given the climate, you might reasonably ask, whither the lower-division strivers of yesteryear, their moment in the sun a decade hence?
The answer seems to be: touring venues rather larger than you might expect. The current tour by White Lies winds up with not one, but two dates at Brixton Academy. Earlier this year, the Wombats headlined Wembley Arena. The Courteeners keep packing stadiums in the north of England. Whatever next? The Spice Girls’ record for consecutive London arena sell-outs quietly broken by Scouting for Girls? A stampede for tickets caused by the re-formation of Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong?
You could read this as revealing a lot about how what’s deemed fashionable doesn’t always reflect what’s actually popular. That said, a sense that fashion has moved on does infect the fourth album by Two Door Cinema Club, the anonymous Northern Irish trio whose sales peak ostensibly came with their 2010 debut Tourist History, but whose forthcoming tour nevertheless takes in – you guessed it – the O2 Arena. Tourist History dealt in then-hip angular post-punk with commercial ambitions, but their ensuing two albums amped up the electronics. On the Jacknife Lee-produced False Alarm they take over almost entirely, leaving their music somewhere in the general vicinity of the 1975 at their least arty and most radio-friendly.
This isn’t, in itself, a bad idea, and not merely because it feels more modish than their initial musical approach. Some of the results feel either commonplace or, worse, flimsy and annoying – perhaps unwittingly, Satellite sounds like mid-80s Europop, and thus proves something of an endurance test if you don’t have a lasting love for the oeuvre of Modern Talking and FR David – but there are tunes here that suit the makeover. Dirty Air and Satisfaction Guaranteed have strong hooks. Nice to See You ropes in Zimbabwean band Mokoomba on backing vocals and rapper Open Mike Eagle, then spends six minutes crossing its fingers that someone will compare it to Talking Heads, or Fashion by David Bowie. No chance, but it is a decent song in its own right. Similarly, frontman Alex Trimble has described the brief Break as coming from “the McCartney school of songwriting”. That rather amounts to gilding the lily – the tinny staccato synths vaguely resemble Wonderful Christmastime and that’s about it – but it’s a sweet melodic fragment nonetheless.
The lyrics are largely centred around the internet. Listeners are advised to don body armour and goggles, lest they get hit by shrapnel from the truth bombs that follow. We variously learn that social media isn’t necessarily a force for unmitigated good, that defining yourself by the number of “likes” you get is a bad idea, that the image people project online often fails to reflect reality and that some people are using it to sell us things: watch out, manufacturers of Huel, Mahabi slippers and the Noom diet system, Two Door Cinema Club have totally got your number. These are inarguable points, but it’s also inarguable that they’ve been made before, umpteen times, and in some cases by Two Door Cinema Club, whose 2016 album Gameshow also socked it to social media and consumerism.
Their fusillade against the internet highlights the problem with False Alarm. It isn’t a bad album – the songs are largely alright, the production neat – but there’s nothing on it that you haven’t heard already. Moreover, Two Door Cinema Club don’t have enough personality to impose any kind of distinctive character on the material: nothing is given a unique spin or a different slant. You could say that was the trouble with noughties indie 2.0 from the start, but it didn’t stop it getting huge a decade ago, and – given the ongoing appetite for this kind of thing – you doubt if it’ll stop anyone buying False Alarm, or indeed, filling the O2 Arena.
This week Alexis listened to
Daphni: Sizzling (feat Paradise)
Paradise’s obscure 1981 boogie track Sizzlin’ Hot reworked by the masterful Dan Snaith into frantic-paced, full-on, four-to-the-floor disco.
