robin loxley singer in 2 door cinema club

Two Door Cinema Club are essentially a quirky hybrid of Bloc Party and the Shins trying to be a lighter version of the Foals if put to a Franz Ferdinand drum groove. One common complaint of critics is that originality is not one of Tourist History’s selling points. One could even be forgiven for thinking that much of Tourist History, released by Parisian arbiters of cool Kitsune, was perversely manufactured for the dubious honour of radio and television overkill. In fact, it is the group’s penchant for the effulgent and infectious, dished out in admirably pithy chunks, that landed them on the BBC long-list as a Sound of 2010 (the lads narrowly missed out on making the Top 5). So we can forgive them of any cheese that may be secreted from their songs’ all-consuming catchiness.

This bent towards the naif is explained somewhat by the fact that many of the album’s songs were written while Messrs Alex Trimble, Sam Halliday, and Kevin Baird were finishing up high school. What we get with their debut effort, Tourist History, is a tonic of adrenaline-filled, youthful enthusiasm that may even inject a spring into the step of the hard-boiled cynic. With this band, what you see is what you get, and the Bangor trio don’t pretend otherwise. But before we slap this Northern Irish trio with that most virulent of terms, “landfill indie”, it should be noted that Two Door Cinema Club at least lack the risible seriousness of Keane and precarious self-importance of the Temper Trap (song titles notwithstanding), and therefore warrant some earnest attention. From this, one is tempted to conclude that the group’s time under the gimlet glare of expectant indie music lovers may span little more than the average length of their songs: about two and a half minutes.

Two Door Cinema Club make sun-drenched, guitar-led indie pop bearing song titles that, as the BBC observed, sound as if they were swiped from a badly-written self-help book.

Robin loxley singer in 2 door cinema club