The London five-piece Tom Dougall, Dominic O’Dair, Maxim Barron, Charlie Salvidge and Max Oscarnold release their first album on Tough Love and their fourth for the world. It’s recorded in home studios, mixed at Studio B in South London and completely self-produced. This extra material recorded and commisioned around the same time the original album was made. The deluxe version of Toy’s fourth album, “Happy In the Hollow”, is now available online. It includes the original album alongside new artwork and four rare or previously unavailable songs, as below.
Happy in the Hollow
The Willo (Sonic Boom remix)
Strangulation Day (Cosey Fanni Tutti remix)
Move Through the Dark (Daniel Melero & Yuliano Acri remix)
The Proper Ornaments is a great name for a band infatuated with their record collections—a group that decorates their spare little songs with only the most finely curated influences, like so many baubles on a tree. The Beatles’ White Album here, Pink Floyd’s *Meddle *there. The Beta Band here, Yo La Tengo there. The Velvet Underground everywhere. But there’s no reason to be cynical about this London quartet. The Proper Ornaments are based primarily around the songwriting partnership of James Hoare (of the wonderful now demised Ultimate PaintingandVeronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold. Unlike some of their ’60s-loving, vinyl-obsessed peers it’s possible to separate your appreciation of the Ornaments’ nifty influences from your appreciation of their songs. The pair craft beguilingly simple, guitar-driven psych-pop stitched together by gorgeous, laidback harmonies.
Brighton, England’s Toy have released their first new music since their third LP, 2016’s Clear Shot.
The krautrock five-piece unveiled two new tracks, “The Willo” and “Energy,” for a limited edition 12-inch single, out Friday, Sept. 14, via Tough Love Records. The 12-inch is the band’s debut release for the label and it will also serve as the first taste of their unnamed forthcoming fourth studio album, which will be released in January 2019.
Toy have earned a reputation as a band of integrity, virtuosity and taste, with Tom, Maxim, Dominic, Charlie and (joining in 2015) Max creating a sound that is embedded in the underground tradition, yet distinctly their own. Now here comes a two-track twelve-inch on Tough Love, a foretaste of a forthcoming album in January 2019, which marks a new dawn for this most singular of bands. The Willo is a dreamlike, seven-minute glide, redolent of a forest at sunset and just as pretty, but not without hints of malevolence. Maxim’s fingerpicking acoustic melds with electric twang from Dominic, and a whirling organ from Max Oscarnold gives this elegant creation an extra layer of disorientation and depth. “People appear to have seen Will-o’-the-wisp, a mysterious green-blue light, over the centuries. It generally means something ominous is about to happen”, says Tom.
“The Willo” opens with electronic percussion and acoustic guitar as the band’s ghostly ringleader and frontman Tom Dougall warns of a sinister ray of light, which has become woven into English folklore. The song hovers with Max Oscarnold’s (also of Proper Ornaments) whispering, psychedelic synths, twinkling guitars and Dougall’s eerie yet calming vocals, which culminate into a slowly unfolding, hauntingly beautiful track that highlights what the band does best: scrupulous writing and musicianship with equal parts brooding and dazzling.
Then there is Energy, which lives up to its name with thunderously metronomic drums from Charlie Salvidge and a ferocious guitar from Dominic O’Dair. The lyrics, culled from a story written by Max about a nighttime ritual, are obscured by the barrage-like forward momentum of the music. The twelve-inch, recorded and mixed by the band between Oscarnold’s Stoke Newington flat and a south London studio, is the first release for Toy on their new label Tough Love, representing the latest stage in the evolution of the band. Since their inception, they have released the acclaimed albums Toy (2012), Join The Dots (2013) and Clear Shot (2016), and toured everywhere from Serbia to China, while holding onto that youthful, magical moment of discovering strange new worlds of innocence and experience.
“People appear to have seen Will-o’-the-wisp, a mysterious green-blue light, over the centuries,” says Dougall of the inspiration behind “The Willo,” the single’s A-side. “It generally means something ominous is about to happen.”
Proper Ornaments is the project of James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold (Toy, Pink Flames). The band germinated slowly from their friendship, which began when Max distracted James from shop-keeping, as his then girlfriend attempted to steal shoes. Max was freshly arrived in London from Buenos Aires; helped out by Andrew Loog Oldham as it happens, to escape a drug-lead implosion of a previous band and a family member’s plan to have him sectioned.
The chance meeting blossomed into an epicurean riot of luminous highs and cold, dismal crashes that conversely produced music that was very well ordered and faintly angelic. It was so much deeper and more refined, serious, simple and affecting than anything suggested by the bare facts – a guitar band in East London, ten years into the infancy of a millennium that had so far freighted those five words with plenty of horrendous mental associations.
They released a single on San Francisco’s Make a Mess and an early E.P. with London’s No Pain in Pop in 2011 – then a collection, “Waiting for the Summer” (Lo Recordings) in 2013, which bore the influence of past UK guitar music: The Beatles, Felt, Durutti Column, Television Personalities, Teenage Fanclub – framed by West Coast psychedelia and sunshine pop. Tape recorded and unpretentious in all sorts of ways, it seemed bound to slide around the sides of a snow globe-like mainstream, into that ambivalent fate of being a bands’ band: Real Estate, Woods, Crystal Stilts, and Metronomy solicited them for support slots.
Debut LP “Wooden Head” came out in July 2014 and was heard more widely. Perfecting the unique slant of their previous work and polishing it, the album crackled with hints of something majestic behind what could at first be heard, a secret sotto voce world inside. It was as quietly sly and mercurial as it was driving and accessible, and its masterly crafted simplicity drew extensive critical praise. The sweetness of the record, unless you took to a certain track with the lyrics, in fact belied their circumstances. They were living in Whitechapel on slender means and debauched psyches, crawling through the remains of homelessness, unemployment and divorce. Unpredictable, violent acquaintances that were occasionally made band members orbited and crashed. The album was made in a whirlwind of chair-breaking, knife-drawing chaos.
James and Max started out writing the follow-up in January 2015. On “Foxhole” they’ve sliced away a whole stratum of their sound, removing some distortion and lowering the frequency of plectrum strokes to allow more nuanced, piano-led ideas to emerge. The title isn’t a reference to Television’s jaunty proto-punk record but seems to be more of a dark, protective interior, a head space sketched out on “Jeremy’s Song.” While their particularly recognisable production style (a bright, frozen counterpoint to the airless mixes one encounters more often) remains, three things stand out as likely reasons for the shift in mood. By the time they got around to recording again in James” bedroom in Finsbury Park that Summer, the instability around the recording of “Wooden Head” (and the five years before) had slid into a deep and seething acrimony. Second, they both bought pianos. Third, when the band, with Daniel Nellis and Bobby Syme joining on bass and drums went to record at Tin Room in Hackney in June, the pinch wheel on the 8 track machine was broken and somehow no one noticed. All but one recording, “Frozen Stare,” was hopelessly warped, so they went and did it all again from scratch back at James“.
“We ended up doing the whole thing there as the atmosphere suited the direction of the foxhole and we were more comfortable working on it in our own time,” says James, “We wanted to move in a slightly different direction from “Wooden Head,” away from the distorted guitars and into a more peaceful area.”
The mechanical blow out that had wasted weeks of their time and money coincided with a thaw in their friendship, and by the time they were re-recording they were both being treated conspicuously gentler by life.
“That’s why the record has a laid back, conversational, not imposing or anxious feel in my opinion,” Max says about their rapprochement, “There’s also the technical limitation of doing it on an 8 track which gives the songs a more sparse sound.”
Themes of their previous work have been picked up again and honed. The sense of being overlooked and isolated, inevitable change and drift particularly set in terms of age, predominates. Undercutting the feelings of forward movement are ones of a gnawing permanent stasis and confusion wrought by memory. It’s a sombre but also more direct and open effort, from its first number “Back Pages” (“See me on the back page/of last year’s modern age”) onwards.
If “Always There” was the most melodically fluid but dimly lit point of the first record, there are another half album of songs here at least that are as strikingly gorgeous and unsettling. “Memories,” “Just a Dream,” “Frozen Stare” and “When We Were Young” are in this mould, as is the icy, slightly devastated goodbye that closes the record “The Devils,” filled out with piano reminiscent of Big Star’s “Third” or Lou Reed’s “Berlin” and cracked double bass. What was in evidence in two of their earliest songs – “You Still” and “Are You Going Blind?” – an understated, poetic play of moral sensitivity against a callous distance, of warmth and hostility, has reached its most sustained expression yet and gives their pop moments of a haunted love song quality along the lines of Del Shannon, Lesley Gore or Roy Orbison.
“Bridge by a Tunnel” and “When You Wake,” on the other hand, share in the breezily abstracted character of 2014 single “Magazine,” the later laying a sardonic (non)apology – “I know you know, things could’ve been different/but they’e not” over careful daubs of slide guitar. “Cremated” is also guitar-lead, and reaches an early apogee of morbid oblivion baiting, while “1969” is a really perfectly recorded grand sweep of sound that recalls Serge Gainsbourg and “Harvest”-era Neil Young.
Proper Ornaments hold the attraction of seeming to not try very hard at all and achieve something outstanding nonetheless. Quite apart from our attachment to laziness and chance which make this seductive, textures of dappled drums, softened-out guitars and vocal harmonies that slide along as effortlessly as this, any evidence of conscious construction spirited away, are in themselves totally ecstatic to listen to.
After their debut album ‘Wooden Head’ was released in 2014, in between their other ventures James Hoare from Veronica Falls and the brilliant Ultimate Painting and Max Claps from Toy got back in a room together. Back in November there was another track by Proper Ornaments, It’s the second song they’ve shared from their second LP ‘Foxhole‘ “Creamated -Blown Away” was the first but this from this wonderful duo of Ultimate Painting’s James Hoare and Toy’s Max Oscarnold. The band is back today with “Bridge By A Tunnel,” a Velvet Underground-indebted low-key groove that will have you comfortably easing into the work week’s wintry abyss. It’s from their imminent sophomore album Foxhole is due out 20th January via Slumberland in the US and Tough Love in the rest of the world.
The Proper Ornaments are soon set to release their second full album, “Foxhole” via Tough Love, due for release in parallel with single ‘Memories’, which is premiering above.
The London-based band are comprised of Veronica Falls’ James Hoare and TOY’s recent addition MaxOscarnold. Foxhole is a follow-up to their first release in 2014, entitled “Wooden Head”, and working in a similar vein, this new album showcases Hoare’s knack for ‘60s pop songwriting but with cleaner, piano-based accompaniment. This was achieved using self-imposed limitations; “doing [the album] on an 8 track… gives the songs a more sparse sound.”
Here, The Proper Ornaments are now refining and exacting their process, both as composers and musicians. The resultant feel is more of gentle, resigned melancholy rather than the upbeat power pop of their previous release. In reference to this, Hoare says that “[they] wanted to move in a slightly different direction from Wooden Head, away from the distorted guitars and into a more peaceful area.” ‘Memories’ unravels at a leisurely pace, though is not without hooks in its winding chord progressions.
The Fat Angel Sings 