Most of the band studied music and one went to clown school. The significance of this escapes me until the first tumbling bars of ‘Well Done, Josef’ alert me to the band’s rather cheerful, carnivalesque approach to folk – at once psychedelic, studious and almost entirely made up of rippling, cyclic guitar riffs and thumping percussive interludes. It’s an Elliott Smith/Sufjan Stevens vibe that lends a languid, almost murmuring slant to brass parping, party-poppers like ‘Air Filter’, with its crazy time signatures and spiralling stax saxophones, whilst songs like ‘Drums and Phase’ roll along with the same charming jollity as the aforementioned circus clown.
Playful, beautiful, tumultuous, dazzling and precious in joyfully uneven measures, the finished result is a little like kitting out your local Brazilian drum band with feather boas and persuading them to play the hits of Lemon Jelly. On circus wires, obviously. Terrific.
‘Toys’ is released on 06/09/10
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