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Including toy instruments, even the implication of toy instruments, on your recording is an iffy maneuver. For many possible listeners, toy instruments signal a fast track to the realm of too clever pop music, of Pianosaurus or the Flying Lizards. A place where everything is a touch cuter than it needs to be.
Allston, Massachusetts recording artist Walter Sickert keeps us pointed on the right path, and away from cuteness, by including "army" and "broken" before the word toys. If there are toys marching along with Sickert then they're toys made in Tim Burton's Halloween Town but dropped in the wilderness between worlds where they've had their little mechanical hearts broken from loss. You can hear the snapping of tiny aortic wires and springs on this recording.
Not that this is a simple or childish album. The majority of instruments on this CD are organic: acoustic guitar, piano, violins... but this isn't a quaint folk collection or overdone singer-songer writer outing. Each song is a densely layered assemblage where Sickert's voice is accompanied by sounds that seem simultaneously natural and treated. They move in and out of prominence like haywire echoes. This layering is most evocative of industrial music in the days when the actual and the sampled became interchangeable.
Walter's voice is the most consistantly distorted sound on the album. That, together with the raw almost naked subject matter of love lost, is reminiscent of the early work of Nine Inch Nails. This is a man who has been damaged, broken. Being broken is the key; it implies outside influence. Sickert isn't sick, he isn't someone rotting on the inside. He's someone who's had something bad happen to him, something that took away what once made him whole.
The distortion on his voice isn't a simple way for him to hide. It lets us know that we're not dealing with the surface level of the singer. That this isn't the smiling, happy mask that most broken people show as their face to the world. This is the fractured face underneath.
We're only given the name of one of the broken toy army: Edrie. Her vocals arrive occasionally to counterpoint Walter's. So who makes up the rest of the shattered plaything parade? Walter.
When you listen to this album all of those ghosts that dart among the trees, all those grinding whispers that echo, all those stepped-on soldiers.. they're all Walter. They're all trying to transform themselves back into a whole that someone wants to play with.
http://www.myspace.com/armyoftoys
http://www.armyoftoys.com/
And check out the Walter Sickert & The Army of Broken Toys song "Sacrilege" on the Sepiachord Jukebox
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