Album Review: Downtown Rockers [EP] by Tom Tom Club

Spinning off from Talking Heads in the early '80s, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth gave their parent band a run for its money as far as killer party bands went with Tom Tom Club. Their rock-solid rhythms and skeletal grooves were more concerned with getting down than getting artsy, and their limited discography yielded a few of the most timeless dance-rock tracks of all time. With the five-track EP Downtown Rockers, the band offers its first new studio material since 2000's mixed-bag The Good the Bad and the Funky.

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Tom Tom Club’s first batch of new songs in 12 years feels like a blast from pasts both far away and recent. Title song “Downtown Rockers” acts as both a shout-out to Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s ‘70’s contemporaries and a recognition of newer New York bands the Talking Heads offshoot may have influenced, such as Le Tigre (whose “Hot Topic” could very well have been a template for this). An enormous amount of fun is derived from these six tracks.

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On its first album in more than a decade, Tom Tom Club returns to the dance scene in tight musical form. The husband-wife duo of Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, of Talking Heads fame, offers six original new songs and six dubstep remixes and instrumental versions of those same tracks on its sixth studio record, Downtown Rockers. Musically, Downtown Rockers serves as a much-needed filler in the wide-ranging void that is the modern dance scene.

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One might easily think that the Tom Tom Club’s new EP, titled Downtown Rockers and featuring echt-cool 1974 photos of Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth on the cover, is a nostalgic look at their halcyon days at CBGB. But Frantz and Weymouth aren’t ready to play the “remember-when” game quite yet. “If people want to think [Downtown Rockers] is nostalgic, that’s fine,” Frantz recently told CoS.

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