Album Review: Teenagersintokyo - Sacrifice

Nestled amid Sydney’s disgustingly good-looking curves and sun-kissed sand and surf, while the hot-bod, bronzed ones roasted like BBQ chicken, indie vampires were lovingly caressing the city’s dark corners. And they were bewitched by throbbing basslines, ensnared by New Romantic-esque synths, and their hearts quickened to the likes of Ultravox, Depeche Mode and The Cure.

Enter the much touted fivesome Teenagersintokyo; nonchalant and sharply dressed, with bowl haircuts, brogue shoes and a platinum-cropped guitarist who looks like the blonde one out of the Human League. A swish of Disintegration-era Cure and a shimmer of NYPC femme-glam in the icy-cool, sometimes eerie, sometimes seductive edges of their sound meant thirty degree sun was never going to be their ideal playground. Cue then a move to the shaded streets of London, a remix by The Horrors and album production by Bat For Lashes’ man David Kosten, and Teenagers had finally found a place where their gloomy-hearted pop could flourish.

Yep TIT (an abbreviation the band are surely regretting now) might evoke visions of excitable Japanese youngsters, futuristic neon and bad karaoke, but one stretch of silky limbs, a pout of glossy lips and it’s clear we’re dealing with an altogether more glamorous beast. Following less than a year after their self-titled EP, it’s automatically clear that Sacrifice is less a progression more a succession of their already established blueprint.  However their full-length debut is without a doubt leaner, tighter, sexier, more alluring.

Take single ‘Peter Pan’ that all but rinses its synth-line from Magazine before its twitchy doom-disco leads us to the dance floor, vocalist Samantha Lim sighing, “So long, we ran from home, this daydream’s gone.” Or the both tense and intense ‘End It Tonight’, re-recorded from the EP, that showcases the band’s penchant for building polished choruses around anxious basslines, Lim crooning ‘I lose myself everytime I step outside, I lose myself everytime I hear your name.” It’s easy to imagine them making the brightly coloured CSS fans feel rather unsettled during their live jaunts together.

‘Talk to the Fire’ purrs, prowls and smoulders, Lim sounding not unlike Blood Red Shoes’ Laura-Mary Carter. And with a chorus that gleams like black diamonds, its twitching bass eventually leads into a crashing apex that sounds not unlike the aforementioned duo’s ‘Don’t Ask.’

It’s clear that Teenagersintokyo have followed the same trajectory White Lies tracked a year before them - chasing the perhaps now done-to-death melancholy take on 80s indie - however this dark-hearted synthpop with it’s super-sexy sheen was always destined for the club, glittering like midnight velvet and creating obscure shadows in smoky recesses.

But to go back to the concept of Sacrifice as a continuance, even prolongation of previous work rather than a progression, for all their bittersweet sparkle, there’s little here sonically that adds to the Teenagersintokyo experience that tracks like ‘Very Vampr’ and ‘Black Bones’ didn’t accomplish first time round on their EP. Furthermore, some of the tracks don’t live up to the strength of those predecessors. ‘Sacrifice’ is boring and repetitive, the thumping beat of ‘Isabella’ is the first moment where the albums superfluous shine fades, with rather bland results, and although ‘Long Walk Home’ provides a marginally different side to the band, really it’s nothing more than synth fluff.

Undoubtedly, this is a better collection of songs than the band’s previous effort; but any given track can capture their gist in a heartbeat. There’s no surprises and apparently they have no tricks up their sleeves. However, when it’s good… hell it’s good, and sets out more than a promise of what these guys could be capable of.