Toilet Boys
The Early Years
Morpheus Records
Punk knows no bounds. You can take damn near anything – from polkas to Phantom of The Opera – and play it fast and badly, and voila! It’s punkified! Here’s a mid-nineties vintage band taking that approach to music, and turning out a decent set fronted by a cross dressing DJ named “Miss Guy.” It’s not groundbreaking, coming 20 years after the original Ramones appeared, but that doesn’t take away any of the power and fury the Toilet Boys crank out. Right off, you may well fall in love with the Kiss-ish “Paul Stanley was a Lady,” which combines a few stolen riffs and some clever lyrics to make a wonderful anthem that bridges the stadium rock world and the world of puke smelling clubs.
The bad part of this disc is the heavy dose of digital stuff, which makes playing this on anything other than your car CD player a challenge. It’s worth plugging it into the CD drive and checking it out, even though it may change all your media player settings. You get a pair of live videos, “Mail Itch” and a ratty cover of “Karma Chameleon.” I can tell these are Mac-only guys: not only do you get to argue with QuickTime over which program gets to play your media file, but the gamma is set so low you can’t see anything without turning off the lights. Plus, they default the sound to max, so there’s a bit of ear drum blasting on the opening of the videos. Very punk, but very rude.
Despite these technical difficulties, this is a fun record with a great cover that rips off David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs look. As someone once said, if you’re going to rip off someone, rip off someone good. These guys do that in spades.
Toilet Boys: http://www.toiletboys.com
