Don’t let the fact that they’ve supported My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy put you off ` Shiny Toy Guns are NOT an emo band. In fact, emotional engagement seems low on their priorities as far as the music is concerned. It’s about the sound, the style, the space age synthesiser sounds, the half-male, half-female vocals, the lush soundscapes and comedown tracks intercepting the kind of tunes that make you do the ‘big fish little fish cardboard box’ dance, that all goes to make this essentially a dance album. If it were the mid-nineties, they’d have twelve number one smashes on this record and would be the biggest band in the country.
So now, in a time when glow-sticks are only to be waved at indie bands pretending to be ‘new rave’, it can be hard to see where Shiny Toy Guns are supposed to fit in. If this was a poor or half-hearted album, they’d be the subjects of ridicule. A band who just didn’t get it or were stuck in another decade. But done well, as it is, this transcends all ideas of what’s cool. Although if you really want them to be hip and trendy, ‘Le Disko’ provides a brief moment of CSS-like nonsense.
