Review: Tokyo Police Club @ Ritual

Friday night, Tokyo Police Club played at Ritual Nightclub in Ottawa.

The first band, Topanga started their set at 9:45pm. Unfortunately, I did not make it down to the venue in time to catch them.

I did make it in time to check out the second band. Hollerado, a local band from Manotick, started their set around 10:35pm. I had never heard of these guys before. Their music plays on Live 88.5 all the time, so my friends were quite familiar with them. Also, these local boys won the Big Money Shot music competition back in 2009. I was really impressed with their performance. You could tell that over half of the people in the crowd were there to see these guys. The crowd was so enthusiastic; it was really fun.

Tokyo Police Club only started playing around 11:45pm, which is really late, in my opinion. Luckily, I drank like 3 coffees that day so I was still awake and kicking. The band put on a good set. For the first half of the show, they played only old material, most of which I did not recognize. Finally, during the second half of their show, they started playing material from "Champ", the one album that I know really well.

During the encore, they played "Favourite Food", one of my favourite songs from TCP. They ended the evening by inviting Hollerado on stage and they played "Baby Please Come Home". This was the second Christmas song that was played during the evening. I'm not usually a fan of Christmas music, but their performance of the song was good.

Overall, I enjoyed the show but it definitely wasn't the best performance that I've seen from Tokyo Police Club.

This was my first time going to a show at Ritual. I wasn't sure quite what to expect, to be honest. Overall, I was really pleased. The layout of the venue is not ideal, but overall, I really liked it.