by Geno Thackara
I’m not sure this one is a “lost and found” so much as a “never had.” The music world hasn’t really forgotten Toy Matinee because the world barely knew it existed in the first place. I blame bad timing. There were a ton of similarly radio-friendly acts floating around at the turn of the 90s, there was no Internet to help it find an audience outside LA and Hollywood, and maybe this kind of well-crafted smart pop didn’t stand much of a chance competing with “Unskinny Bop” or “Ice Ice Baby” anyway. I’m sure the awful what-the-hell-were-they-
Nonetheless, you could do a lot worse than this overlooked gem if you prefer your pop-and-roll on the sophisticated side. It started with Patrick Leonard, a longtime producer who decided to take a stint (or go slumming, depending how you look at it) as member of a band instead of the guy behind the console. Fortunately he knew his weak spots and recruited a cast of musicians more skilled than he was. Even more fortunately, he was aware of a ridiculously talented fellow by the name of Kevin Gilbert, who made the perfect co-writer and singer to bring the whole thing to life. Besides being an amazing and eloquent (if often depressing) lyricist, Gilbert had an uncanny knack for turning misleadingly tricky chords and melodies into ear candy.
“Last Plane Out” starts things with a cute mini-collage of musical scraps and sound effects, the kind of thing more than one young arty band did around the same time, except that most of them wouldn’t follow it with a finger-twistingly intricate lick played on a bozouki. Soon enough the full band kicks in with an easy bouncing verse and a hook of a chorus that sticks in your head for days. It’s so fun that you may hardly notice the deeply cynical words talking about humanity’s instinct for self-destructing. From there Toy Matinee hits a different mood with practically every song and still generally avoids sounding too dated today, leaving aside the synth-y 80s over-production of “Queen of Misery” (which actually could have been deliberate since it was allegedly written about Madonna).
The songs may be mostly catchy but never lightweight or fluffy. Each one has some story and heart behind it, whether it’s a gloomy picture of lost innocence (or mental illness, I’m still not sure which) or a lighthearted surrealist tribute to Salvador Dalí. “The Ballad of Jenny Ledge” even makes the classic boy-loses-girl theme as honest and un-cliched as I’ve ever heard it in a song. If nothing else, it’s the only one I know of where the girl runs away with an Elvis impersonator (and weirdly enough, that one was a true story). The whole thing is one piece of expert tunecraft after another, and you don’t have to know a song’s background to have fun belting it out in the car. The band went away far too soon, and sadly so did Kevin a few years later, but they left us quite a treasure.
