★★★★★ Beyoncé worked with so many people on ‘Lemonade’, her sixth album which she dropped in late April with an accompanying short fi lm, that its credits run to 3,105 words. It’s a testament to her star power that none of her collaborators blabbed before the surprise album release – Bey’s second in a row after her 2013 self-titled LP. But it’s also a testament to her star quality that despite the many, many cooks in this kitchen, ‘Lemonade’ feels like an album only Beyoncé could make. ‘Lemonade’ is officially billed as ‘a conceptual project based on every woman’s journey of self knowledge and healing’, but the narrative is really one of marital infi delity. ‘How did it come down to this? Going through your call list,’ she sings on the deceptively breezy reggae bounce of ‘Hold Up’, before issuing what sounds like an ultimatum on the brilliant, Jack White-assisted rock stomper ‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’: ‘If you try this shit again / You gon’ lose your wife.’ The electro blips of ‘Sorry’ feature another killer couplet: ‘He only want me when I’m not there / He better call Becky with the good hair.’ Beyoncé stops short of singing ‘My sister Solange appeared to attack you in a lift after the Met Gala in 2014’, but this is still startling stuff which must be tough for Jay Z (who appears in the short film) to listen to. As the story progresses from rage to reconciliation, ‘Lemonade’ continues to thrill musically. Bey teams with The Weeknd for ‘6 Inch’, a kind of strip club update of
Toy are one of the most promising young bands in London. They're also one of the hairiest, with '70s-style mops that hang down over their eyes. That might be why the five-piece can be hard to get a handle on. Are these vinyl-loving retromaniacs indulging in a bit of harmless musical nostalgia, or are their psychedelic krautrock stylings painfully derivative?
This second album won't do much to change the minds of those who think the latter: 'Join the Dots' is full of nods (or hairy headbangs) to the past. There are echoes of shoegaze originators My Bloody Valentine on 'Endlessly', along with riffs pulled from krautrock pioneers Neu! on the title track, and a ghostliness gleaned from avant-garde electro-pop band Broadcast on 'As We Turn'. Even the album sleeve seemingly aspires to conjure up Kreuzberg in 1972.
Judging by the album's title, Toy are perfectly happy to be seen as connecting points of reference. More importantly, though, the band and their producer Dan Carey have made a quality product. 'Join the Dots' is a sleek, shimmering record, full of ramshackle reverb and throbbing bass lines. Those heady influences remain, but in the year since their self-titled debut, Toy have developed a darker and more expansive sound. There's still a heavy dose of motorik, the hypnotic drumbeat designed to replicate the experience of speeding along an autobahn, but it's now a nocturnal motorik for driving under the infinite night sky. It's hard to pick holes in songs this compelling, especially when many crescendo spectacularly into swirling walls of noise.
Plagiaristic? Possibly. Enjoyable? Definitely. Toy represent a bit of the old world, and a bit of the new. And that's more than okay.