TOY – Join the Dots

TOY try to Join the Dots....
TOY : Join the Dots
4.2 PIAS
2013 

TOY : Join the DotsFor a certain age group and class background, gifts received at birthdays and Christmas were totally unrecognisable from today’s expensive fare.  None of the flashy electronic gadgetry, certainly no planes, trains and automobiles (Toy, of course!!!).   They consisted of such bland items as jigsaw puzzles, coloured pens and pencils, thus allowing your own artistic merit to shine through, or not as the case may be.  Another perennial favourite was the dot-to-dot book, in which each page was an amalgam of numbered dots.  The idea was to start at dot number one with your coloured pencil, and proceed to draw a line through each subsequent number to the end.  With the joining of each dot an image would begin to form on the page.  It could be a sailboat, a spaceship, or a helicopter (Kopter??)  Thus leaving the dotist (patent pending on that one) with a feeling of creating his own artistic deity.

Let us now address the eleven dots that constitute the hour’s worth of music in question on the Brighton five-piece’s second album.  It begins with an inventive instrumental “Conductor”, with its driving tempo giving each musician equal opportunity to rumble, sweep and crash in their own space and time.  Immediate comparison is, oddly enough, Foals (QRO live review).  Although they exist on a different arc on the rock and roll sphere to TOY, they used an instrumental as their opener on the Holy Fire album.  This worked especially well as a great live opening track, creating a feel of anticipation in the gathered throng.   Unfortunately long after “Conductor” has abated and more dots have been added, no discernible picture has begun to emerge.  What we instead get is a dreary off-centre smudged line falling away towards nothing.  Tracks are buried deep beneath dark clay of heavily processed bass and synthesiser, topped off with heavy-handed percussion.  Tom Dougall’s lack of choral virtuosity is highlighted with his deadpan staccato delivery only adding to the loam; whilst Dominic O’Dair’s guitar is buried so deep it could be lodged in the bedrock.

As a follow up to the first album released little over a year ago, it is a total non sequitur.  Even the individual designs on each of the sleeves give a signpost to the direction in which the encased music is heading.  The first is all colour and psychedelia portraying the dreamscape originalities held within, whilst Join the Dots is all grey and smudgy betraying the aural bleakness to come.  After nearly an hour has passed we reach the last and only other favourable track, “Fall Out of Love” (“F.O.o.L” for sticking around this long?).  The song is based on a ‘groovy’ bass and off kilter distorted guitar with Dougall finally finding his vocal range.  The ‘motorik’ is finally kicked into life over the final ten minutes as the band veers and swerves impressively over the extended outro.

So there we are, the dots have been joined and the picture that is left at the end has far from lived up to the expectations created by the previous one.  Perhaps if TOY turns to a fresh page and get out their coloured pencils then that magical spaceship may appear, hopefully lifting them from this moribund earth bound existence.

TOY – Fall Out of Love

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