Hello Tokyo, Sell the Stars

Hello Tokyo has achieved a small amount of fame for the single “Radio,” produced by Wallflowers bassist Greg Richling. I personally think they should have taken the next baby step of an EP before trying a full-length album, though, because Sell the Stars is a trick, a sneak attack, and I can’t decide if I hate them for it or not. It calls to mind Siouxsie and the Banshees’ The Rapture not in style but in its shattered presentation.

Here’s the skinny, puppies. The songs of Hello Tokyo have been featured on MTV’s Real World and on Road Rules. Those are your warning signs right there. The entire approach to the first half of this album is desperately modern in the footsteps of Goldfrapp and No Doubt, though there is some real feeling in JohnE Cheeseburger’s distinctly Spanish guitar. The entirety of the first half of the album, however, is depressingly radio and overproduced, though it does offer a subsistence helping of ethereal poetry. There’s not so much a darkness as a duskness; a slope, not an edge. The whole approach, especially the title track, is hung on the hook of Kat Sugar Plum’s voice, with most instrumental breaks failing to fill the space without her at all. And here to finish off the commercially perfect emptiness of the first act is your typical ballad “Hands to Hold.” Why do they put the acoustic ballad in the middle of the album? It’s as if they expect the listener to be so exhausted by the previous tracks that some kind of rest is essential. Well, sorry, but it’s not.

Do you think I hate the album? I don’t, and the reason why finally kicks in at track six. “The Affair” is the song that made me request this album for review in the first place and is really the reason you should buy it. I know now that if I had randomly selected any other track on Hello Tokyo’s Myspace for perusal, I probably would have skipped reviewing it and gone on to another band, but here their approach is tried and true without being cliché. Effected-out verses and clean choruses and the same stuttering solos are still in the way of pure artistic orgasm, but in “The Affair” they’re overshadowed by the unbelievably erotic pain of the lyrics and the image of bruised and bloody lips locked in an illicit kiss. The power and the passion help you climb up onto the equally palatable “Midnight Snack,” which retains the kind of catty claws that only Artificial Joy Club used to be able to pull off.

The context set by “The Affair” utterly redefines what Hello Tokyo says in the first half of the album and completely turns it around. A never-miss set of homeruns takes Sell the Stars straight into the somewhat emotionally empty “Run to You” (here an actually necessary breath-catcher), which plays like a hastily-made resolution to not repeat the mistakes made in the previous two songs. A perfect trilogy of subtle beauties finish out what should have been a six-song EP.

In short, the first half of Sell the Stars is a bunch of commercial garbage for the modern MTV emo set, and it’s barely worth the electricity used to power your stereo. The second half, starting at “The Affair,” is a cycle of modern masterpieces that belong on any self-respecting disaffected person’s CD shelf. It’s a sexual soundtrack of crazy power. The differences between the two halves are as minute as they are unavoidable. I look forward to the evolution of Hello Tokyo’s style. Clearly they have one finger on the pulse of America’s musical wrist and one finger on the button supplying the painkillers that keep us from really seeing what’s wrong with the world. I guess we’ll see where they go from here.