33 rebellions per minute
"They're not warts, they're just calluses... I think"
1997
Toenut, TWO IN THE PINATA
I have this suspicion my quick opening band-to-band comparisons are getting less useful with each attempt, but let's try these:
1. Toenut's second album, PINATA, sounds like Toenut's first album INFORMATION with better playing, production, melodies, singing, and, for singer Kate, vastly better fashion sense (the goth-anorexic look was _not_ right for her, although the experience probably helped the evil-whisper vocals on "Welcome To Toenut" work so wonderfully here). Toenut thus leap from "sometimes interesting and fairly promising" to "very good indeed". That's worth knowing, surely?
2. PINATA could be Verago-go in the process of turning into Lazer Boy. This doesn't cover Kate's vocals at all, but is a very accurate description of the tuning and chord patterns, which show precisely the same internal logic/ external defiance as Verago-go's FLIGHT 45 debut; and the little snatches of vocal and found-sound sampling, the evolving drone that opens the album, the harder-hitting guitar attacks, and the occasional feel of bad sci-fi movies put to good use, could be straight from FORGET NOTHING.
3. Or, PINATA could have been Lush's follow-up to their debut SPOOKY if their strongest intervening influence had been discovering Game Theory's LOLITA NATION. This captures the somewhat unnerving precision and purity of Kate's multi-octave voice (a dead ringer for Emma Anderson's, and sometimes indistinguishable from a Doctor Who style synthesizer too), the sorts of melodies she applies it to, and the thick, richly processsed multiple guitar sounds that gave Lush the most self-descriptive name in rock for years. It also captures Kate's unawareness that consonants carry worthwhile informational value besides the message "this vowel ends here, start next vowel", so I don't know if the words live up to the titles ("Test Anxiety", "Rewhacked", "Minion", and "Mr Cockley Puppance, Esq" are several that strike me as having potential). But the LOLITA influences, granting they probably exist nowhere outside of my head, would explain the greater variety of more rock-based guitar sounds; the stapled-together structures of songs where the thick four-chord midsections are surrounded by rattling percussive guitar interplay that repeats strange patterns over and over with the self-righteous insistence that there's no point in learning a whole darn chord sequence only to use it once; and the sound experiments. By which I mean anything from the near-monotone opening to "Debug Me" (picture if civil defense alerts had been modeled on the massed "ding!" sounds a million old typewriters), to the crickets auditioning to play salt shakers for a radio program in "Inverted Flatspin"'s background, to the little song fragments running around. "Warts", for example, is a brief overlay of a cautious choir, waiting for the light to change before each new unison "ahhhh", as a guy nervously tells about "This thing hurts, whatever it is on my thumb, I'm real worried about it. This girl that I was attracted to today, I was driving around, she said 'You have warts on your thumb!' I said, heh-heh, well..." etc. "Surprise", more simply, finds three interlocking ways to completely misunderstand the concept of "drum loops", while "The Pigs" features exhausted torture victims attempting to barter their freedom by making airplane-on-runway sounds.
It is rare to find an album so sprawling and odd, yet so tightly-played and (except the short bits) coherent; it's even rarer to find one that's also sung beautifully. I found this one, frankly, because of a triumph of music reviewing: a fair, accurate, tempting descritpion by a man (Dave Thompson of A.P.?) who didn't like the record. "File under 'interesting'", he concluded witheringly, and I am grateful. But if you file it under "Toenut", you'll find it more easily.
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