Running out of ideas.
You know you’ve made it as a band when The Daily Mail says your new album is ‘”A huge leap forward.” That’s the Daily Mail, that great bastion of guitar pop that has overseen every new act and genre in the past 100 years and gave them all their thumbs up seal of approval.
Oh wait, that’s wrong, this will be The Daily Mail who still finds a reason to print front covers of Princess Di (shes dead and shes not coming back, get over it) and even though they wont admit, they don’t like foreigners that much. So brilliant Athlete, that’s a great endorsement from a great bunch of lads for your new album, it makes you wonder how limited the positive press cuttings were for their record if this is the one that is deemed to be their most positive.
However, it would be wrong to judge the band on another journals say so, so if you can avoid the stampede of right-wing and Middle-Englanders rushing down to the shops to buy the album, perhaps we should take a listen to their latest single and see if theres any hope for them.
The track is called ‘Tokyo’, which is good, because that’s the de facto capital of Japan, a place that Daily Mail readers wont like (and yes, that’s the last reference to that paper we’ll have in the review), so we’re all back on board and ready to go over the single.
It may have came to your attention that we rather built up the intro and in all honesty, its because the song isn’t worth writing too many words about, it’s a standard non-standout guitar track that major bands would relegate to a B-side, as opposed to the second single and the one hitting the airwaves before that lucrative Christmas market.
It picks up near the end and the tempo and temperature rises and although it has an infinite amount of energy compared to ‘Wires’, it seems directionless and it would be astounding if Athlete made anything like the same impact with this song, that they have done previously. ‘Tokyo’ is inconsequential fluff and does nothing to make itself heard or loved.