Landfill indie. We’ve all heard the term landfill indie. It’s applied to the huge volume of ‘The’ bands at the turn of the millennium that were so numerous that they became bland and generic. The Wombats. The Vaccines. The Random Nouns. Yet the early 00’s had some fantastic bands. Here’s The Cooper Temple Clause’s best songs.
It’s mostly jingle-jangle hooky pop that inoffensively bepops around with foppish hair and I’m going to say bad BO, although I cannot confirm or deny that by look at a photo. Everyone listening to it is probably a student getting obliterated on snakebike. I was.
The Cooper Temple Clause are undeniably a ‘The’ band. Their name begins with ‘The’; tick. Yet they’re more than that. They were active just after the millennium. It’s starting to look a bit landfill. Yet it shouldn’t, and maybe they suffer by association.
Here are The Cooper Temple Clause’s best songs.
Vampiric (I’m happy with that adjective – you can tell because I made it a sub-heading)
If you describe a brooding band then by law you have to compare them to Joy Division. TCTC are like Joy Division went to a nightclub that didn’t make you pulsate like Ian Curtis but instead made you reach for the lasers. They manage to be both dark and vampiric yet massively Tyres from Spaced with huge uplifting beats.
There’s many venn diagrams that Interpol and TCTC sit in the middle of, although TCTC maybe went to a couple more raves.
City at night
I have a habit of making deeply pretentious Spotify playlists. I’ve no doubt mentioned this before and I’ll mention it again.
I could fit most TCTC songs on my ‘City at Night’ playlist – a playlist containing music I could listen to whilst nodding off in the back of the taxi as it speeds through the neon lights of Central London at 2am – but personal restraint ensures only a couple of their songs makes it on there.
I told you they were pretentious.
Blow by blow
Their debut album See This Through and Leave is built around three epic songs, each reaching simultaneously bleak and euphoric crescendos. Digital Observations half way through the album is a song for the dot com era, whilst The Lake and The Murder Song ominously bookend the album.
Their second album Kick Up The Fire, And Let The Flames Break Loose was the last with Didz Hammond, the bassist who was lured away to join Carl Barat’s post-Libertines band Dirty Pretty Things. It’s slicker, as most second albums are now the band knows their way around a studio, and matches electronica with riffs.
Their third and final album Make This Your Own was rockier but still with the ‘dance/disco/acid house/this record is a crime scene’ vibe.
The Cooper Temple Clause’s best songs
- Promises, Promises
- Blind Pilots
- Digital Observations
- Waiting Game
- The Murder Song
- The Lake
- Been Training Dogs
Crucially, TCTC know the value of a catchy hook. You can have your beard-stroking intellectual music, but any song with a hook is a song that’s worth listening to. With The Cooper Temple Clause’s best songs you know they have that ability.
Promises, Promises is a straight forward rock track. It builds on a Sonic Youth riff and is their most straightforward accessible track. If you like that then check out Blind Pilots and if that’s your thing then give the rest of Kick Up The Flames… a spin, the record that both of those songs are taken from.
Aside from the named songs before, Waiting Game from the third album is an undeniable banger while Who Needs Enemies received radio airplay and Been Training Dogs is the song you need if you ever find yourself need to get super aggressive. Which hopefully is never.
Former TCTC members having gone on to form Type Two Error – you should give them a listen too.
Featured image by Sam Ford reproduced under the Creative Commons license.