Alt Tuesday: Two Door Cinema Club

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 // Alt Tuesday

With Two Door Cinema Club’s second album in the works, it seems fitting that I throw out a review of their first album. Tourist History received a lot of critical acclaim — and for good reason. The 10-song indie dance-rock album has quite a few amazing tracks on it.

Two Door Cinema Club is doing something very refreshing for the indie scene. The lead single off of their album, “What You Know,” made a solid dent in alternative charts with its hot melody and dancey chorus.

What Two Door does for modern music is actually quite revitalizing. It is pretty apparent that they have worked heavily on their melody and their rhythms. Tracks like “Cigarettes In The Theater” display strong riffs that were carefully plotted out. “Do You Want It All?” is a melodic track in 7/4 time, which catches the listener off guard — in a good way of course.

Despite the strength of most of the tracks on here, Two Door Cinema Club’s main problems are quite basic. A lot of their songs tend to run together as they do not exactly experiment with what they do. They know what they do well and they stick to it. Unfortunately, their second problem is more significant: They lack substance in their songs lyrically.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, in Alt Tuesdays, I place a lot of emphasis on writing quality lyrics that actually mean something. Two Door tends to fail entirely at presenting those. After learning all of the lyrics to “What You Know” for my a cappella group, I realized that the song literally says nothing from beginning to end. A little disappointing, to say the least. Fortunately, this is not a problem that is apparent unless you look for it. Although I suppose I just made you look for it… whoops.

Here’s the thing about Two Door, though: They are simply a band that knows how to sound tight on an album, which is quite admirable considering that a strong sense of rhythm and melody both seem to be absent from a lot of modern music. Look out for a new record from them soon, as I would bet that their second effort is a similar sounding pop gem.