With track titles such as Grass Beatbox, Rabbit
Pushing Mower, Golden Fish In Pond or
Realistic Martian Landing Set, it is fair to
think that Toy’s approach is playful. Claiming
to have met in the Casio department of giant toy shop
Hamley’s in London, British composer Alisdair
Stirling and Norwegian producer/sound designer Jorgen
Traeen, best known for having produced Sondre Lerche,
Magnet and Jagga Jazzist
in recent years, formed Toy a while ago, and have since
released two singles, Rabbit Pushing Mower / Valley
Cars on Tellé, and Sedan Through Tunnel
/ Decorama on Smalltown Supersound.
Confessing a fascination for Pingu and work from the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Stirling and Traeen collect
here an intriguing and light-hearted series of electronic-based
compositions made-up of highly tuneful melodies and
fast-paced pop structures. Found somewhere between incidental
music that wouldn’t have been out of place in
British seventies light comedies or, at its most serious,
in an episode of Doctor Who, Toy’s music
is truly evocative, and, despite the happy-clappy mood,
has something of a nostalgic streak running through.
Combining the child-like vision of bands such as Plone
or Pram with Japanese-style
electronica, Toy manage to pack in a lot in forty-five
minutes. Their two previous singles already provided
an interesting insight into what they were capable,
but this album gives them more room to expose their
funky playground pop. Using anything from toy piano,
guitars and dulcimer to synthesisers and Stylophone,
the pair continuously change the aspect of their music
while keeping with the overall theme. Right from the
outset, they set the tone with the hilarious Grass
Beatbox. Within the first twenty seconds, the melody
and soundscapes change no less than thee times, and,
despite the main themes being re-jigged and developed
further afterward, the pair somehow pack in even more
over the next two and a half minutes.
Far from offering any moment to rest, each track is
expertly merged into the next, and this album soon appears
as an unstoppable machine. The pace slows down slightly
on The All Seeing Eye and Swingsung,
but this is short-lived and it picks up once again on
the second half of the album, only to calm down on the
closing Decorama.
Over the course of a complete album, Toy’s sound
may appear a tad repetitive and eventually lacking of
enough scope to be taken entirely seriously, but it
remains a joyous enough piece to entertain all the way
through and proves a perfect antidote to grey wintery
skies and long nights.
3.7/5 |
