Cover up! Londoners’ bedroom reinvention.

Songs Of Consumption

AT their worst, covers albums can be shambling musical lean-tos, hastily erected to cover up the dry creative springs beneath. Other times, though, a single band or artist interpreting the work of others can be a fascinating insight into their tastes and approach – Bowie’s Pin Ups, say, Costello’s Almost Blue, the Banshees’ Through The Looking Glass or Dirty Projectors’ Rise Above.

Toy’s Songs Of Consumption certainly fits into that second category, and perhaps even edges into the hallowed company of the Bad Seeds’ Kicking Against The Pricks or Cat Power’s The Covers Record, albums which provided their performers with a canvas on which to explore and define their own sound, with no need to worry about the quality of the material. Last January’s Happy In The Hollow was an adept evolution for the London-based quintet, mixing extra synths and psychfolk elements into their stew of shifting, swirling guitars and motorik drums, but Songs Of Consumption, their fifth – recorded, produced and mixed in the bedroom of the band’s synth expert Max Oscarnold – is even better. By stripping their sound down to the minimum, reminiscent of Cabaret Voltaire, Suicide or The Durutti Column, Toy have made an LP far more than the sum of its parts.

Some of their song choices are unsurprising, but imaginatively reinvented: the opening take on The

Stooges’ explosive “Down On The Street” is tightly restrained and perhaps even more menacing than the original, threads of fragile guitar wandering through the sequenced-synth clatter. Their version of Nico’s “Sixty Forty”, a relative obscurity from 1981’s Drama Of Exile, actually manages to improve on the original, stretching it out to over seven minutes and layering all manner of electronic percussion beneath its elegiac Mitteleuropa melody. Their take on “Lemon Incest” also refines Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s original, bringing out the beauty of the Chopin-inspired chords and plastering the result with Enoesque ‘warm jet guitar’ and Tom Dougall and Maxim Barron’s fey vocals.

That’s not the only song that flirts with incest on Songs…, however, with Toy’s eerie reimagining of The Troggs’ “Cousin Jane” borne on woozy drones and distorted blocks of sound that maul the simple melody. The result, thrillingly, is somewhere between the industrial subversion of Throbbing Gristle and the pastoral kosmische of Harmonia. “Cousin Jane” is just one of a set of more obscure songs that the band try on for size here, with other highlights including the throbbing Moroder pulse of Amanda Lear’s fantastic “Follow Me” and the closing instrumental, John Barry’s spooky “A Doll’s House”.

Proceedings aren’t all haunted and leather-bound – sometimes Toy just have fun recreating their favourite synthpop arrangements. “Fun City”, originally a Soft Cell B-side, is a faithful tribute, albeit with Dougall singing an octave lower than Marc Almond, while their version of Pet Shop Boys’ “Always On My Mind” (itself a cover, of course) is oddly moving, evoking New Order in its cantering sequencers and charmingly unsure vocals. The relaxed mood of their bedroom sessions emanates through these two tracks especially, providing an immediacy that can be missing from more overworked, overthought recordings.

For all the jewels among their previous work, it’s sometimes seemed as if Toy themselves have been drowned out beneath the noise of their deeply hip influences, unable to let their personalities break through their armour-plated LP collections. On Songs…, though, they’ve found a sound that works perfectly for them: stripped-down but abrasive, modest yet mirror-glossed, eerie and soothing all at once. Dougall and Baron’s atmospheric vocals have never sounded better either, freed from the pressures of competing with a kaleidoscope of distorted guitars.

What Toy take forward from this to their next album proper remains to be seen, but they’d be wise to continue on the route they’ve mapped out in their keyboardist’s bedroom. Ultimately, Songs… towers above most covers albums – by paying tribute to their influences, Toy have for the first time created something fully theirs.