It’s hard to overcome the feeling that this kind of finger-wagging is fine if you’re Crass, living off homegrown vegetables in your anarcho-syndicalist commune, but perhaps a bit much if your music has been used to advertise everything from Vodafone to Debenhams. Previously an inconspicuous, poppy, synth-heavy, putatively alternative rock band whose reviews seemed to deal almost exclusively in faint praise (“ A less po-faced Foals”), the County Down trio were transformed into an inconspicuous, poppy, synth-heavy, putatively alternative rock band operating at a level of popularity where arenas are filled with ease and so long can be taken to make a follow-up that it starts being referred to as a comeback.įour years separate Beacon from its successor, time during which Two Door Cinema Club’s personnel apparently did the kind of things that members of successful rock groups feel the need to do, including “giving themselves space to discover their individual identities outside of the band”, exploring eastern religions, staging photographic exhibitions, “battling their various demons”, and alas, on the evidence of Gameshow’s opening track Are We Ready? (Wreck), writing songs that castigate consumerist culture and admonish their audience for their materialism in time-honoured, imagine-no-possessions-I-wonder-if-you-can style: “You should be comfortable, don’t think at all … you get paid, don’t need any respect.” It reached No 2 in the UK charts and sold 100,000 copies. T wo Door Cinema Club’s second album, Beacon, was a record that, to borrow the famous assessment of David Frost, rose without trace.
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