Toy

Thought the album was good, but when I got to the last track, the title track, everything changed, such a beautiful sound, I listened to the album again and it all fell into place. A very good album. PS. Laugh every time I look at the album cover, Great.

I've already reviewed the box. This release certainly does make a lot more sense.Unfortunately, there is now an insatiable desire for anything DB, and is marketed and talked up in order to appeal to people, whereby I think you could release an hour of him smoking and it would be a 'lost masterpiece', sadly.On the strength of the five or six listens I’ve had of this, I’m afraid that it seems more likely that he came off the roll of recording all this then applied hindsight and went “That was fun, but actually not worth releasing”.This is his earliest songs, recorded by a top flight band. But that still does not make them good songs. It’s an energetic but very dull affair, that’s been talked up way beyond what it’s worth.There’s far too much of that godawful cheeky chappy London singing voice from the great DB, and it just grates.Everything he did surrounding the 00s was forward movement, and as he said to Donny McCaslin during the early part of recording of Blackstar, when Donny started to familiarize himself with DB’s back catalogue “Don't bother listening to all of that, I’ve moved on, that was then, this is now”.Take Toy for what it is, a curio, a bit of fun, much like his first solo album way back.But don’t believe the hype.