Donated to my poor collection by EBP (nice review by the same here), the new album by Norwegian/UK duo Toy is a big hit on the iPod right about now. It's all rinky dink toytown electronica, but somehow manages to be hugely intricate, quite overpowering in places and wildly effervescent. How can you resist a record that has titles like "Rabbit Pushing Mower"?
Answer: you can't.
However it DOES kinda run out of steam by track 5. In olden days they would have been a mighty singles act, and there's no shame in that. But I get the feeling that SO much work went into those first 4 or 5 tracks that the impetus ran out...take longer next time boys, or make it an EP.
2 comments:
agreed - it's definitely the case that the best stuff is near the front of the album. i'd rather hear less music on albums these days anyway - 70 minutes is way too long for my attention span...
It's the old hip hop conumndrum. The first album that really started to bug me was Lauryn Hill's (otherwise excellent) Miseducation of...Filled to the brim with annoying inter-track nonsense (see also De La Soul) and by track 16 (16!) you'd gone off to mow the lawn (with or without a rabbit ;-)). At the risk of being a total bore, all the work I've done recently on the Robert bleedin' Palmer sleevenotes has brought home to me how cool 35 minute albums are. NONE of Bob's went over 40 mins, and you never feel remotely cheated.
On another level, there's also this problem that we have no real singles market any more (despite what the MAN seems to want you to think) - thus, a band like Toy are forced to come up with a whole album when they've really put a whole lp's worth of effort into ONE track! No one ever accused Brian Wilson of selling out by putting 6 months work into Good Vibrations (and there's a really good case for saying that he was never really an albums artist anyway). Maybe all this downloading of single tracks will be a good thing for music after all. For too long I think we've been hung up on the idea of a suite of numbers that somehow (artificially) hang together. Before 1963 no one really gave a fuck anyway.
Sorry, I know this is all old hat stuff, but we live in interesting times!
I'll get me coat ;-)
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