Toy

It wasn’t hard to see why The Horrors’ Rhys Webb picked Toy as one of the most exciting bands of 2012.

Apart from an obvious shared love of krautrock and British indie bands of the ‘80s, both acts were clearly the type to actively embrace a particular type of sub-cultural stage image: for The Horrors, cod-goth; for Toy, stoner-psych.

You could almost imagine Toy’s Tom Dougall and The Horrors’ Faris Badwan debating skivvies vs. skinny ties as much as talking about their record collections.

This isn’t to say that Toy are a band in which style overpowers substance. Even as the guests of cider marketers with money to burn (cheers, Bulmers Underground), while Toy’s presence in Australian venues is odd – almost as much as their absence from Australian radios – it certainly isn’t unwelcome.

But more on Toy later … First we have to consider The Frowning Clouds, a fitting addition to the bill given their studied Brit stylings and clear love of mum and dad’s lovingly preserved vinyl stash.

An effervescent five-piece with three guitars, The Frowning Clouds (a) appear too young to be doing this sort of thing, and (b) are pretty bloody good at it.

They’re almost exactly what you would expect a casting director to come up with if they were told, “Get me band who look like they mainline melted Kinks records, have watched Help! more times than Star Wars, and might have at least one member who listens to Wavves when the others aren’t looking.”

The music they play is kitschy, poppy and hardly groundbreaking, but it’s obviously steeped in an authentic admiration for the bands who inspired it. So much so that when combined with their infectious and gawky charm, the resulting songs are head-noddingly resistant to cynicism. You just have to embrace the British-Invasion-via-Richmond sound and let the crunchy-jangly garage vibes take you away.

While The Frowning Clouds are agreeably the kind of local band you want opening a ‘British music night’, in terms of stylistic fit with the headliners, there’s something of a gulf.

Toy might be Londoners, but as the first curtains of hair appear on stage, it’s immediately obvious that Dave Gilmour circa Pink Floyd: Live In Pompeii is more of an icon for them than Ray Davies circa Something Else.

Beginning with their self-titled album opener “Colours Running Out”, the Corner Hotel’s ‘intimate mode’ space is filled with a roaring wall of sound driven heavily by Alejandra Diez’s keyboards. The track quickly sets the scene for much of the set – chugging motorik rhythms, swirling (sometimes overpowering) synth lines, psychedelic guitar flourishes and Dougall’s low, almost unwavering vocal tones.

Slipping quickly into their epic debut single “Left Myself Behind”, the band show off the single-minded intensity for which their live shows are known. Dougall and guitarist Dominic O’Dair hunch over their guitars as though oblivious to the audience and stage-lights, generating a kind of perpetual energy that seems to feed back into drummer (and Robert Plant lookalike) Charlie Salvidge.

Neither Dougall or his bandmates are particularly expressive. Smiles are rarely cracked – not that anyone’s face beside the singer’s can easily be seen under their impressive stoner-rock manes. This ‘serious business’ approach suits the band well though. Especially when they drop into album highlight “Dead & Gone”, its seven minutes of slow-burning, metronomic menace building into a scintillating guitar crescendo.

The instrumental “Drifting Deeper” allows room for some more psych wigging-out, before things get all emotional for the cliff-edge romanticism of “My Heart Skips A Beat”. Ladies and gents, if a man in a black turtleneck who knows how to use conditioner sounds like your idea of a boyfriend, then this is the song for you.

Soon it’s back to rhythmic rock ‘n’ roll business with the appropriately titled “Motoring” (there’s nothing that says krautrock more than references to roads and/or cars), another track that builds into a blistering, high-BPM display of fretwork and cyclonic effects.

By now the audience is attuned to the fact that Toy are no-nonsense band. As they step directly into album closing epic “Kopter”, there’s a real sense that this song is intended as the cap on a brief (in number of songs) but effective showcase of the five-piece’s talents. With its wiggly bassline, Dougall’s proto-goth vocal delivery and maddening speed, it’s as if The Sisters Of Mercy had listened to Can instead of Motörhead.

Replete with wilful mic-stand nudging by bassist Maxim Barron – “trashing” would be too strong a word – Toy close out the set in powerful style, barrelling through the 10-minute song and somehow remaining aloof while heads-down in the music.

The absence of an encore comes as no surprise, but it also drives home the somewhat workmanlike approach of the band that became apparent during the set. Toy can play, they have excellent songs – many the equal of anything on Skying – but as the limited crowd attested, they remain frustratingly under-profiled in Australia.

Is the coldness and efficiency of tonight’s performance what they need to win new fans? That remains to be seen. The only thing that remains certain is that they’re a band to watch – and if they decide to show some personality, next time they might be watched by a few more.