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Two Door Cinema Club "Tourist History" - Retrospective Review

When Two Door Cinema Club released their debut album Tourist History  in 2010, indie-infused synth-pop was seemingly on the rise, following iconic releases like Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix  in 2009, and MGMT’s 2007 debut Oracular Spectacular . Alongside these, Passion Pit, Bombay Bicycle Club, and The Temper Trap were all emerging in the indie scene, with more groups in that vein set to follow. At the time, it seemed like most of the praise in the indie world was centered around either indie-folk or the already established post-punk revival. In retrospect, reading reviews and commentary from those years, the Two Door Cinema Club, Phoenix, etc. sound was too often scoffed at, acknowledged as catchy but not profound, especially in the US. Looking back now, the profundity of records like Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix  and Tourist History  were overlooked, and this is evident by seeing how streamed and recognized these songs are today.

Metacritic’s compiled score of Tourist History  puts the record at a 67/100, with magazines like Pitchfork surprisingly not even reviewing the record at all. By our research and input, the compiled score of the record seems a bit low, as listeners have much nicer things to say than the critics did. The 2010 Two Door Cinema Club sound was heavily synth-based, but the guitar playing is pretty impressive too. Songs like Something Good Can Work  and I Can Talk  feature some incredibly speedy and infectious guitar hooks, a trait too many synth-pop groups usually lack. The bass hum on the verses of I Can Talk , followed by the off-beat, bouncing guitar playing in the pre-chorus, is sheer indie gold. I Can Talk  goes just as hard today as it did in 2010, perhaps even more so now, seeing the guitarlessness of much of contemporary indie synth-pop. Post-production aspects of I Can Talk , like panning and guitar layering, come off as even more impressive now when played through nice headphones. It may be old-fashioned to always yearn for guitar, but the simple fact is that it usually helps, and it rarely hurts to wield a six-string, at least in indie.

The poster child track of not only the record but also Two Door Cinema Club's overall discography, What You Know  finds itself as one of the most instantly recognizable songs of the entire indie-synth pop genre. Sam Halliday’s danceworthy jangle-pop guitar playing over the chorus screams ‘80s golden age indie rock. The hook is so simple, yet so infectious and equally timeless. The riff is matched by the equally smooth and crisp vocal delivery of Alex Trimble. Fourteen years later, the song remains just as fresh as it was in 2010.

Following What You Know , Eat That Up, It's Good For You  takes the energy down a tad, while still putting Sam Halliday’s guitar at the forefront, this time playing more intricate and somber patterns. It’s quite unusual to hear so much intricate guitar work played alongside abundant synth and sound effects. Two Door Cinema Club was one of the few bands to really venture down that road. They mixed the guitar playing of the post-punk-revival rockers like Bloc Party and The Strokes but removed the rough-edged angst. The resulting sound was unique to them, with bands like Phoenix or Bombay Bicycle Club not really venturing down that road, even though their relatively limited physical instrumental input (at least by Two Door Cinema Club standards) was still great, just different. Phoenix's sound had some great guitar hooks for sure, but they were sparse and noticeably farther behind the synths and keys.

Above everything, though, Two Door Cinema Club showed on their debut that they could take a standard pop format and mix the old with the new, creating a sound unique to them, that has since been adored by millions. The vocal beauty of Alex Trimble put forth one of the most pleasing indie voices of the changing decade, cutting through no better than on Undercover Martyn . Trimble showcases the natural groove and momentousness of Irish musicians expertly on this record, while at times still changing it up, delivering more delicate, spacious lyrics over the recognizable Two Door Cinema Club sound. No one quite has a voice like Alex, and his gift at singing is too often underrated, even by us here at Melophobe. At least on his studio-recorded tracks, he was graced with a special voice.

I’ll admit, perhaps the record wasn’t quite as underrated in Europe, but at least as far as we are concerned here in the States, it took some time for a lot of people to really appreciating the record. There are certainly tracks here that are stronger than others, and there are still some people who claim all the songs sound the same, which of course is false although I strangely know what they mean. At the end of the day, though, by our standards, the record is one of the top 200 indie rock albums of all time , even though we seem to be the only publication to believe this. The vocal delivery is great, and the guitar delivery is equally great, while still being a danceable, groovy album much in the style of the crispest ‘80s dance-rock records out there. With the later emergence of bands like Bad Suns, Coin, Hippo Campus, and The Band Camino, the standard they should set for themselves should be Tourist History .

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Album review: “Tourist History” Two Door Cinema Club, 2010

Two Door Cinema Club’s jump into the mainstream set the tone for modern indie music.

A beautiful cover for a beautiful album.

COLE QUINN , Evergreen Sports Photographer January 19, 2023

Mainstream music around the early 2010s saw an unusual trend. Certain songs from the depths of the indie and alternative scene randomly spiked up in popularity.

Sleeper hits like “Sail” by AWOLNATION would take over two years before peaking at 17 on the Billboard 100. Out of this wave of sleeper hits, one album has not aged poorly in terms of quality.

Two Door Cinema Club is an indie rock band from Northern Ireland. I only became aware of the band around their later years and thought of their recent work as nothing special.

After around 2014, I like to say that the genre of “mainstream indie” came into existence. As oxymoronic as it sounds, a lot of popular artists started to latch onto this sound and oversaturated it. As of 2023, most of the more popular “indie” artists sound incredibly bland and do not bring anything special to make them unique.

Music from bands like AJR sound like a creation by a board of corporate businessmen rather than artists. The most recent track from this movement is Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” a snooze fest lacking any drive or passion.

However, before Two Door Cinema Club fell victim to this trend, they offered a sense of originality to their music. Their debut album “Tourist History” is one of the better indie albums from the sleeper hit era.

Most of the tracks aged well, with a handful reaching indie perfection. The album takes inspiration from Bloc Party; utilizing clean and overdriven guitars and fast tempos.

The best song from the album is “What You Know,” which is one of the catchiest songs I ever laid my ears to. The band uses electronic drums, giving the song a punchy, almost live-performance feeling.

The main guitar riff on the chorus supplements vocalist Alex Trimble’s voice perfectly. The song is comparable to “Mr. Brightside.” The melodies of each song are enough to turn a live crowd into a member of the band.

Every live performance of “What You Know” is accompanied by crowd members singing Sam Halliday’s guitar lick. If a crowd is singing your guitar riff louder than the actual lyrics, you have a great melody.

“What You Know” is not the only track on “Tourist History” with something unique to offer. The track “Undercover Martyn” is a rapid-fire track full of fast-guitar playing and energy.

The track’s instrumental bridge is one of the only times I caught myself headbanging to a riff in a major key. Which I can guarantee you is a rarity.

The song’s theme of encouraging an introverted friend to come to a house party fits well within the track’s sound. The song “I Can Talk” has a similar vibe to “Undercover Martyn.” The fast tempo juxtaposed with upbeat melodies creates a song worth dancing to. The tremolo picking of the main melody only adds more to the track.

Other tracks like “Do You Want It All?” and “Cigarettes In The Theatre” help back up the album’s catalog. However, some of the songs fail to live up to the praise of the other tracks. Tracks like “Something Good Can Work,” “This Is The Life” and “Come Back Home” fail to hit the mark compared to some of the other tracks. While they don’t hurt the album’s replay value, they impact the album’s overall quality.

Despite this, “Tourist History” supplies listeners with a wave of originality and serotonin that indie albums post—2010 fail to offer.

Maybe some modern indie bands supply a catchy song here and now, but the rest of their tracks reek of mediocrity. “Tourist History” provides a solid run of tracks that make the album worthy of revisiting, and the debut marked a period in which Two Door Cinema Club created solid music.

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Cole Quinn is a photographer and columnist for the Daily Evergreen. Cole primarily shoots sports for the Daily Evergreen and writes album reviews in his...

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Two Door Cinema Club: Tourist History

Two Door Cinema Club make sun-drenched, guitar-led indie pop bearing song titles that, as the BBC observed, sound as if they were swiped from a badly-written self-help book. From this, one is tempted to conclude that the group’s time under the gimlet glare of expectant indie music lovers may span little more than the average length of their songs: about two and a half minutes. But before we slap this Northern Irish trio with that most virulent of terms, “landfill indie”, it should be noted that Two Door Cinema Club at least lack the risible seriousness of Keane and precarious self-importance of the Temper Trap (song titles notwithstanding), and therefore warrant some earnest attention. With this band, what you see is what you get, and the Bangor trio don’t pretend otherwise.

What we get with their debut effort, Tourist History , is a tonic of adrenaline-filled, youthful enthusiasm that may even inject a spring into the step of the hard-boiled cynic. This bent towards the naif is explained somewhat by the fact that many of the album’s songs were written while Messrs Alex Trimble, Sam Halliday, and Kevin Baird were finishing up high school. So we can forgive them of any cheese that may be secreted from their songs’ all-consuming catchiness. In fact, it is the group’s penchant for the effulgent and infectious, dished out in admirably pithy chunks, that landed them on the BBC long-list as a Sound of 2010 (the lads narrowly missed out on making the Top 5). One could even be forgiven for thinking that much of Tourist History , released by Parisian arbiters of cool Kitsune, was perversely manufactured for the dubious honour of radio and television overkill.

One common complaint of critics is that originality is not one of Tourist History ’s selling points. Two Door Cinema Club are essentially a quirky hybrid of Bloc Party and the Shins trying to be a lighter version of the Foals if put to a Franz Ferdinand drum groove. The hit single “I Can Talk” is Bloc Party on amphetamines, with the curious “Ah-oh, ah-ah-oh” intro lifted wholesale from the Futureheads’ “Hounds of Love”. But this overt reference-making seems to matter squat when you find yourself humming along to lead vocalist Alex Trimble doing the Shins’ singer James Russell Mercer on “Do You Want It All”, or tickled by Sam Halliday’s taut guitar work on “What You Know”. To swindle Jarvis Cocker of a phrase, Tourist History is “a holiday for the ears”, so there is really no reason to be po-faced about it.

When Two Door Cinema Club aren’t beguiling us with twinkling melodies, spine-tingling choruses, and disco rhythms, they produce slightly more adventurous nuggets like “Something Good Can Work” and “Eat That Up, It’s Good for You”. On the former, the band displays a fledgling nous for the reigning Afropop of the day, while on the latter, they tempt us with a charming slice of electro-pop that harbours a molten reverb-heavy instrumental that is wickedly synesthetic.

While invention may not be a going concern, Two Door Cinema Club have proven on their maiden voyage that they jolly well know how to sway a crowd with infective pop gems and seemingly little sweat. That is certainly something deserving of the kind of swagger and confidence the group have displayed in performance. That Tourist History is a light-hearted, jaunty affair bearing an undeniable pop sensibility rather than a high-stakes erudite magnum opus a la Foals’ Antidotes makes it an easy act to follow. Two Door Cinema Club’s flame might just burn beyond 2010.

Two Door Cinema Club - Tourist History

More hooks than you can shake a stick at., reviewer: gareth o'malley.

Talent borrows, genius steals. Or so they say. It’s something that’s quite evident when listening to Northern Irish trio Two Door Cinema Club ’s debut album. Having released a string of great singles, not to mention gotten a place on BBC’s highly influential ‘Sound of 2010’ list, the stage is set for the group’s meteoric rise. It’s a shame then that the band’s motto seems to be ‘forward to the past’. While looking backwards istead of forwards as regards making music is no bad thing (some would argue that the British ‘guitar indie’ scene needs any kind of spark to get things going again, having seemingly run itself into the ground), TDCC ( Alex Trimble, Kevin Baird, Sam Halliday ) wear their influences on their sleeve. There is plenty to get excited about here if you are, say, a fan of Bloc Party ’s earlier sound, or Franz Ferdinand - even as they are now, in fact: ‘Tourist History’ dabbles in electro-pop, just like certain songs on ‘Tonight’ . There are even shades of Death Cab For Cutie here; Trimble sounds like a dead ringer for Ben Gibbard on the album’s lead single, the propulsive ‘I Can Talk’ . ( Gibbard ’s side-project The Postal Service crop up on the album’s synth driven penultimate track, ‘Eat That Up, It’s Good For You’ ). There are flashes of brilliance here, of course. No half-decent debut should be without them. Debut single ‘Something Good Can Work’ appears here in re-mixed form, and is about as perfect as indie-pop gets. TDCC should aspire to better it in future, because nothing here comes close. There are sequencing problems here. You wouldn’t think that a thirty-odd minute, ten track album would have them, but then again, three singles in a row ( ‘Something Good Can Work’, ‘I Can Talk’, ‘Undercover Martyn’ ) is seldom a good idea, no matter how good said singles are. ‘Tourist History’ is bottom heavy, certainly. The promise shown by opening pair ‘Cigarettes In The Theatre’ and ‘Come Back Home’ is cancelled out by the limp ‘Do You Want It All?’ . It’s disappointing that what has been one of the band’s best tracks up to now has had the life sucked out of it for its ‘definitive’ version. Phillipe Zdar and Eliot James make a great production team on paper, but the results here are sadly quite hit-and-miss. A bright sound suits songs like the anthemic ‘This Is The Life’ perfectly, but ‘What You Know’ is suffocated by its production. ‘You can’t live life being second best’ , Trimble sings on closer ‘You’re Not Stubborn’. Two Door Cinema Club would do well to heed his words. The album has more hooks than you can shake a stick at, and there are some real promising moments here. For the most part, however, the band are in thrall to their influences, and some thinking outside the box is needed if they are to create a sound of their own.

Tags: Two Door Cinema Club , Reviews , Album Reviews

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Tourist History

Album review of tourist history by two door cinema club..

Two Door Cinema Club

Release Date: Apr 27, 2010

Genre(s): Rock, Pop, Electronic

Record label: Glass Note

Music Critic Score

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Album Review: Tourist History by Two Door Cinema Club

Very good, based on 6 critics.

On their debut LP, this fresh-faced trio from Northern Ireland deliver straight-up, catchy-as-hell indie pop that sounds like Tokyo Police Club meets Franz Ferdinand. True, these lads aren't reinventing the wheel, but what they forfeit in originality they make up for in perfect execution of cute dance-rock anthems. [rssbreak] Produced by Eliot James (Bloc Party) and mixed by Parisian studio wiz Philippe Zdar (Cassius, Phoenix), the album's 10 tunes sound massive, slick and ready for the dance floor without sacrificing the appealing sincerity in Alex Trimble's vocals.

Full Review >>

One would imagine the bedrooms of messrs Alex Trimble, Sam Halliday and Kevin Baird to be packed to the brim with musical memorabilia from the past decade. Dishevelled copies of NME and Q fight for floor space with well worn and slightly overplayed early editions of Silent Alarm and News & Tributes among others. Indeed, were Black Books set in three grotty bedsits in the Northern Irish seaside resort of Bangor it may pan out something like this.

Up until about six months ago, the world at large could be forgiven for thinking that the only bands Northern Ireland ever churns out are of the “punk” and “rock” variety (we’re forgetting about [a]Snow Patrol[/a] on purpose). Bangor’s [a]Two Door Cinema Club[/a] are apparently hell-bent on proving otherwise, peddling the kind of awkward electropop that could score a million broken-hearted teenage romances given half the chance. Already bigged up by the likes of [a]Kanye West[/a], their debut album is a short, sharp shock to the system.

Though Two Door Cinema Club's music is resolutely indie at heart, the band released its early singles on the hip, largely electronic imprint Kitsuné. After listening to Tourist History, what the label heard in them becomes clear: Two Door Cinema Club craft immaculate pop that is infectious almost to a fault. On songs like their calling card “Something Good Can Work,” nimble guitars and drums -- both live and programmed -- propel yearning verses and big, hopeful choruses perfect for shouting along to.

Two Door Cinema Club make sun-drenched, guitar-led indie pop bearing song titles that, as the BBC observed, sound as if they were swiped from a badly-written self-help book. From this, one is tempted to conclude that the group’s time under the gimlet glare of expectant indie music lovers may span little more than the average length of their songs: about two and a half minutes. But before we slap this Northern Irish trio with that most virulent of terms, “landfill indie”, it should be noted that Two Door Cinema Club at least lack the risible seriousness of Keane and precarious self-importance of the Temper Trap (song titles notwithstanding), and therefore warrant some earnest attention.

Flashes of greatness place TDCC among the UK’s better breaking-through bands. Lou Thomas 2010 Bangor trio Two Door Cinema Club have a penchant for naming their songs with what sound like chapter titles from an awful self-help book. The Northern Irish boys are apparently less crooked than an avaricious motivational guru yet are happy to pepper their debut with tunes called Do You Want It All, This Is the Life and Something Good Can Work.

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Keep On Smiling

By Evan Rytlewski

September 2, 2022

Two Door Cinema Club haven’t been shy about changing with the times. On their 2010 debut, Tourist History , the Northern Ireland trio embodied a transitional era of indie rock, packaging the youthful pluck of Vampire Weekend and Arctic Monkeys with the tightly wound post-punk guitars that ran through so much UK indie during the ’00s. Over subsequent albums, however, their sound has evolved in tandem with the tastes of alt-rock radio programmers. They’ve ironed away the rumpled edges of their debut in favor of polished dance-rock, following in the footsteps of acts like Glass Animals by leaning into synthesizers and putting a slick, contemporized spin on ’80s pop influences. Consider them, if you will, farm-system indie: a band that presents as indie while positioning themselves for something greater, in hopes that with the right break or a licensable-enough song they might get called up to the alt-rock majors.

So far that hasn’t happened for Two Door Cinema Club—the group’s steady streams have never translated into real radio support—but they’re close enough to the piñata that you understand why they keep swinging. Recorded with assistance from the Killers / Bloc Party producer Jacknife Lee, a studio pro as synced to alt-radio’s wavelength as any, the band’s fifth album, Keep On Smiling , revels in the sounds of the moment, even as it ostensibly calls back to the New Wave funk of Talking Heads and INXS . It’s a record as efficient and impersonal as a frozen yogurt shop on the street level of a mixed-use condo development.

True to its title, Keep On Smiling keeps its chin up, with songs about the good old times and the even better ones that lay ahead. “We say it all of the time, the time is now, it’s now or never,” singer Alex Trimble cheers on “Wonderful Life.” The Portugal. The Man -flavored bounce of “Lucky” is similarly fit for pool playlists. But as fixated as these songs are on the bright side, they’re never all that convincing. While the group comes through as usual with hooks, Keep On Smiling ’s sunny-side platitudes and peppy tempos scan as forced fun. This mix doesn’t do these songs any favors, either. They’re imbalanced, too heavy on chirping guitars and reedy synthesizers, which along with Trimble’s falsetto tips them toward the shrill side. They beg for some thicker low end to cut through the treacle, and maybe just a hint of darkness to temper their artificial sweetness. Trimble’s cadence, meanwhile, borrows heavily from David Byrne , especially on the “Burning Down the House”-esque “Everybody’s Cool.” But those echoes of Talking Heads only underscore how desperately he lacks Byrne’s wild edge or cutting view of the world. If anything, these songs tout living the very unexamined life that Byrne’s used to mock. Keep On Smiling ’s glossy veneer never disguises its particle-board center.

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Tourist History

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Two Door Cinema Club

Tourist history, label: kitsune records release date: 01/03/2010.

One would imagine the bedrooms of messrs Alex Trimble, Sam Halliday and Kevin Baird to be packed to the brim with musical memorabilia from the past decade. Dishevelled copies of NME and Q fight for floor space with well worn and slightly overplayed early editions of Silent Alarm and News & Tributes among others. Indeed, were Black Books set in three grotty bedsits in the Northern Irish seaside resort of Bangor it may pan out something like this.

Two Door Cinema Club , you see, are well-versed in the recent past. While it would be unfair to accuse them of flat-out plagiarism, there's no doubt they've spent their formative years studying the UK guitar scene of the post-millennium intently. Were it not for the fact that Tourist History actually takes several of the aforementioned artists' blueprints and turns them into credible happy-go-lucky pop songs, the Xerox Police would already have them fingerprinted, charged and ready for sentence.

As it happens though, the story of arguably Northern Ireland's finest three-piece since Ash thrust 'Jack Names The Planets' on Britpop's unsuspecting hordes is one of tremendous hard work and belief, not just in their own ability but in order to ensure anyone outside of their hometown would take them seriously. It's somewhat ironic that in a similar vein to Tim Wheeler and co., many of these songs were written while the band approached the end of their comprehensive education, and it is that air of youthful innocence and zest that lifts Tourist History out of the cheese saturated quagmire inhabited by the likes of The Wombats and their odious ilk who profess to peddle wares of a similar nature.

Essentially three men and a drum machine, Two Door Cinema Club are something of an anomaly, while their live performances possess an undeniably radiant surge of energy, something never easy to fully replicate on record no matter how experienced or reputable the artist(s) in question may be. Herein lies the biggest failing of Tourist History . If you happen to have caught them in the flesh, there is a nagging sense of disappointment that this album doesn't quite match the dizzying adrenalin rush of their show, while the slightly auto-tuned vocal harmonies can be a tad annoying in places. Likewise the intro to what would otherwise be Tourist History 's stand-out 'I Can Talk', the "ah-oh, ah-ah-oh" 's shamefully rip-off The Futureheads in such a cringe-inducing way that any sane person will possibly want feel the urge to stick their head down a toilet or in a lit gas oven for thirty seconds at least. However, the song's ensuing two-and-a-half minutes more than make up for its cacophonous opening, mixing Bloc Party's guile and wisdom with a pop sensibility not normally associated with modern-day guitar oriented bands.

Elsewhere, the playful melodies of 'Undercover Martyn' and 'Do You Want It All?' merrily rub shoulders with the more introspective 'Something Good Can Work' and 'What You Know', each furrowing their way through the math-goes-pop shenanigans of a more accessible and less po-faced Antidotes into the bargain. 'Come Back Home' even reminds us of a time when Franz Ferdinand were considered to be the most exciting prospect the UK had to offer not too long ago, Alex Trimble's "Find the strength to find another way" refrain echoing more than a twinge of the Kapranoses about it. The closing 'You're Not Stubborn' could quite easily be attributed to Newcastle underachievers-that-should-have-been-massive Kubichek! in a previous life, its coda resembling the Geordie foursome's 'Method Acting' both musically and vocally.

Of course there is always a downside to having so many points of reference, namely that eventually one's own identity will become lost in the flotsam. However, with barely a duff song here bar the minor irritations mentioned earlier, Tourist History is an infectious debut that may well divide opinion, but at least suggests that amidst all the uneasy listening and obtuse noises coming out of the underground at present there are still those capable of writing the odd tune or ten.

• 7 Dom Gourlay's Score

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Blake C. Scott. Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism .

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Evan Ward, Blake C. Scott. Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism ., The American Historical Review , Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Page 789, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae100

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Because of the implications of US imperialism in the circum-Caribbean, the scholarship on the history of tourism there is among the most robust subfields in Latin American history. Beginning in 1998, with Rosalie Schwartz’s elegant Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba , a spate of books a decade later broadened the theoretical approaches to the field, with Dennis Merrill’s comparative diplomatic study, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (2009). From there, Christine Skwiot ( The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism in Cuba and Hawai’i [2012]) and Catherine Cocks ( Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas [2013]) infused postcolonial perspectives with their respective monographs. The latest, Blake C. Scott’s Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism , threads a subtle connection between a postcolonial comparative critique of tourism in Cuba and Panama, with deep meditations on the imperial and tropical contexts of tourism development in the broader region.

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