Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Albums of the Year # 27 TOY

'When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide...'

British psychedelia, plundering sounds from down the decades in TOY's Clear Shot. The earliest precedent for this are probably Magical Mystery Tour Beatles and Syd's Floyd, but there's plenty else in the mix too. Not least eighties British indie. Not a groundbreaking album by any means, but a melodic, inventive and charged one in that way that weak-wristed English guitar bands strangely can be. 


This will remind anyone who has lived in Brighton over the past couple of decades and has the vaguest interest in this kind of thing, of the types of musically obsessed pale youths that haunt its lanes, clubs and record shops on grey November afternoons. I spent a year there almost twenty years ago and it seems much hasn't changed. TOY are Brighton residents and represent their constituency well. People with Felt, Stereolab, Shoegazing, OSTs and Krautrock albums in their record collections and bookshelves stacked with thumbed paperbacks, always willing to sit down and watch Withnail & I one more time. A particularly English kind of dreaming.

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