REVIEW: Toy Death
23 July 2015
Lazy Bones Lounge, Marrickville
In the musical sense, we are called “punters” for a reason. Any time you pay actual money for a live show you are, in effect, taking a punt that the act you’re paying to see will be worth the money you have spent. Normally you come away with a view either way. It was money well spent or you lost out.
But it’s not always the case. Sometimes you don’t know. So it was tonight with the Mattel-inspired boys Toy Death; definitely the most unusual musical act I have seen in over twenty years of seeing such different musical acts. Toy Death are so utterly unique that their absence of reference points makes it not only impossible to categorise them, but problematic to even describe them. One can’t rely on the usual “they sound like a cross between this band and that band”, although my friend and I did notice a definite tip of the hat towards the “Teletubbies” and “In the Night Garden” children’s television shows. Certainly the complete confusion they create for adults would seem to affirm this.
The concept itself sounds simple enough. Three medium-sized men on stage all dressed in suits that appear a cross between “Yo Gabba Gabba” and Parliament-Funkadelic. Their faces are covered for good measure. What of the music? Well picture all your children’s annoying toys randomly thrown together making voluntary and involuntary sounds of varying pitch and volume all linked together and played through very loud speakers combined with what sounds like rudimentary keyboards with indecipherable rapping over the top and incoherent beats somehow keeping it all together.
How does that grab you?
In seeking to understand them what I came away with were a bunch of questions: Are they some kind of situationist critique, pointing the finger at us poor unsuspecting punters for even bothering to pay the door charge? Are they merely playing with form and seeking to remove all pre-conceived ideas about what pop music actually is? Are they working in the tradition of bands/concepts like ‘The Residents’, making it high art and observational and not just really silly? Are they some kind of in-joke, the meaning of which is only known by the three guys up on stage?
Ultimately they are probably the most punk rock thing you or I will ever see (and I saw the re-formed Saints a few years back, so that must be saying something). The spirit they most closely invoke, more through attitude than via sound, is the New York pre-punk scene of the mid- 1970s. That wonderful period before the music press appropriated the term “punk” so recklessly.
Me, I love a good racket. Sometimes that’s enough for me. Toy Death only concern themselves with the volume and energy bits but it works. It’s entertaining and experimental and just plain fun in one of the best venues in the inner west!