Well, well, this is something of a revelation. Never mind where My Toys Like Me are, where have I been? With rave reviews from Uncut, Mixmag and even the Sunday Times, they’ve clearly been getting their name about ahead of this, their debit album. I wonder what I’ve been missing out on, and am curious to find out.
‘Superpowers’ begins the set with a retro-sounding drum loop, over which a girlie voice straight out of the Kate Nash / Lily Allen school of glottal-stopping vocals. Irksome? Actually, there’s something rather intriguing about Frances Noon’s singing. It has a darker edge than the aforementioned cockerney luvverlies, and while hinting at the same kind of streetwise sassines of these southern songstresses, there’s an underlying touch of mania that’s hard to define but undeniably present. The bouncy bossanova beat stalls and a muzzed-out guitar adds not only an extra dimension but a whole other genre collision to the mix.
‘Sweetheart’ is similarly forged from a melding of different and seemingly incongruous sounds, the soft around the edges bedroom disco electronica that bubbles along battles with a buzzing garage guitar that might be low in the mix but creates just enough discord as to induce a touch of seasickness.
It’s pop, but it’s anything but obvious, and while comparisons to the Ting Tings are also almost inevitable, they’re not entirely justified. There’s a lot going on here, much of which lurks beneath the hazy surface. Barnaby is low-fi synthpop – pure analogue – with a punk attitude, the guitars played ramshackle and off-kilter, the vocals gum-chewing and bratty, while ‘All Over My Face’ combines the best elements of Portishead and X-Ray Spex, with a touch of ska and some laid-back brass thrown in for good measure. And good it is. It’s not all upbeat and bouncy, though: ‘Grin & Wriggle’ and ‘Making Fire’ are downtempo and scratchy, more trip-hop than drum ‘n’ bass, moody and murky, drawn curtains and lone candles, with xylophones and kitchen whisks as a sonic backdrop to simmering hurt.
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‘Skylights’ returns to danceable beats courtesy of Roland or Casio, smooshed together with some woozy synths, and segues seamlessly into ‘Quiet Please’ from which Noon’s voice calls out sounding lost and almost disembodied, and not just a little unsettling, amidst the incidental sonic interference and stuttering muffled electronic pulses of fractured rhythms.
The album concludes with a cover of Van Morrison’s ‘The Way Young Lovers Do.’ It might not sound much like the original, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The youth of today!
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