Toydeath

Picture a hyper band of aliens channeling through a broken AM radio, and someone's playing with the speed control. But the Hendrix-worthy feedback wails are actually the sirens of toy fire engines. The spastic beats courtesy of model helicopters. Toydeath proves that punk ain't dead, it's just moved into the toy box.

Re-purposing electonic children's toys to create energetic bursts of rock'n'roll mayhem, this Australian trio knows you don't have to play by the rules to have fun. Using their noisy gizmos, they extract the elements of music that kids will grow to torture their parents with. These 8-bit instruments provide the kinds of tinny distortion and glitchery that bands like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson sell their souls for. It's like listening to Sigue Sigue Sputnik as Tamagotchi.

"Jam with Elmo," squeals a familiar fuzzy voice, leading listeners in a hyper digital dance. A chorus of circuit-bent animals sing a round of "Funkytown." A playroom parade of blaring toy trucks welcomes you to "Twaffik City." Each track on this disc could be the soundtrack to a maniacal cartoon, or your next sugar high. Let's hope nobody prescribes this band a dose of Ritalin while they continue to craft their hyperactive hootenanny.
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If Stephen King, a carton load of Barbie dolls, three glam rockers and a coin-op version of Berzerk were lashed together, set on fire and subsequently fried with one kajillion volts of electricity, then Australian musical outfit Toydeath would be the mutant offspring of the smoldering, glitching, molten plastic remains.

The band's appearance is the first indication of a lo-tech experiment gone wonderfully wrong; the Sydney-based trio taking on the disturbed, future sex-doll party visages of 'Big Judy' (Melissa Hunt), 'Disco Barbie' (Chris Murphy) and 'GiJoe' (founder Nick Wishart). But it's only when the band busts out a bunch of electronic toys and sends them into a crazy, wailing, spluttering frenzy of hyperactive melody that the true extent of the band's demented genius and ridiculously brilliant choreography manifests.

'All of our music is made from children's electronic toys,' explains Nick. 'We take the toys and modify them using electronics. ”Hardware hacking” or “circuit bending”, as it's called, is a technique where you change an existing circuit so that it behaves in a different way; you're effectively making a new instrument, or “bentstrument”. '

The critically hit-and-miss result is anything but conventional. High pitched bursts of feedback blends rhythmically with the broken neighs of a horse, while Jesus stutters out passages of Scripture to the bleeping, screeching crescendos of white noise, cheap sax guitars. fairy wands and a naked George Bush doll that says, 'I come from Texas'. - Game Set Watch