Listen closely to TOY in chronological order and by the time you reach their third album, Clear Shot, you’ll notice the subtle jettisoning of the psychedelic pretensions that first buoyed them.
The Brighton bunch, reshuffled slightly with Max Oscarnold replacing Alejandra Diez on the keyboards, still aren’t completely impervious to strung out intros, eldritch airs and aloofness. The krautrock and shoe-staring influences have stayed put, as has Tom Dougall‘s wafting vocals. But the new songs are more clipped (there isn’t a ten minute number in sight) and hook ups with instrumentals set aside in favour of melody. The latter of which they’ve always been capable of underneath their partiality for chunky, laminated sounds. It seems like they’re having a go at making as straight a pop record as their sombre, anti-mainstream sentiments will allow them.
Take We Will Disperse and its high-spirited guitars and criss-crossing synths for starters. There are enough happy nods in its neck to land on a radio playlist that isn’t a Steve Lamacq BBC Radio 6 show. The bracing Dream Orchestrator could have been born on a dancefloor, and if it wasn’t, the thumping rhythm wants to shove you on one, to just make you feel.
This newfound, if minor, willingness to be a sentient member of this world as opposed to being beached on a plain reserved for the weirds and alternatives continues on I’m Still Believing. The sturdy strum of an acoustic guitar is a first for the quintet and the closest admittance on offer to their love of the British folk scene and bands like The Incredible String Band. However, their more natural sonic ancestry à la old and neo-psychedelia in the end fingers its way through to the fore.
Opening track A Clear Shot is a song of two halves. Uncomfortable chords are away hacked at for a good while before Dougall laments like a disinterested Morrissey about the streets below being “a town I used to know”. Frenetic drumming eventually lifts you from the listlessness as the latter part surges towards a raging finish. Keyboards on Fast Silver gently jump and trickle, reminiscent of The Doors, and the snake charm wriggle of Jungle Games is as narcotic as George Harrison on the primetime summer of loving Blue Jay Way.
Clouds That Cover The Sun, cradlesong in its melodic tenderness, might well be the most beautiful thing they’ve ever produced (it certainly takes top soft spot on the album). Niceties aren’t ever endemic to a band as gimlet eyed as this though. Their purpose is to fog the daylight, trip the senses. “Am I surprised by the state of my mind when I close my eyes”, grills Dougall on the rolling, menacing Spirits Don’t Lie, while the closing Cinema winds up leaving a lot of space, a little too much space, to lose your head in.
Clear Shot is TOY’s shortest, yet for it most focused album to date. And for a band so flagrantly marinated in the past, there is an aura of progress, in the dark or not.
