Artist: Toronto Drug Bust, The
Label: Sedvex
Released: 2010
Runtime: 34:56
Rating: 3.5/5
The Toronto Drugbust is a name that conjures up the arrest of Keith Richards more than 30 years ago, when “absurdly heavy” 22 grams of heroin turned up in his hotel suite in Toronto, Canada. Now it’s also the banner for a project by Slovenian Izak Košir, who, with the help of foreign musicians, has managed to put out a studio debut titled “Enfant Terrible”.
So the time has come to call in some favors. A few years ago, Košir helped organize club tours around Slovenia for acts like the (now disbanded) Finns Turku Romantic Movement, Canadians Neil Leyton and Morgan Finlay, and American James Apollo. That’s how he got producer Rami Helin on board, along with guitarist Mikael Lundin (aka Neil Leyton), former Turku Romantic Movement keyboardist Joonas Granquist, and two more Finns: Heikki Rasi on percussion and Juho Viljanen on brass.
What we get is a good half hour of stripped-down, no-frills rock “drive”, which doesn’t bring a musical revolution to the international scene, but does bring a fresh trendy breeze to Slovenia, one that’s been blowing across the developed world for a whole decade already. “Enfant Terrible” makes it clear right away that these are musicians who know how to handle things in the studio. Simple, get-under-your-skin indie rock you can put on at any hour of the day, built from natural sonic collages that deliver the lively, warm and dynamic sound the production calls for. These nine songs don’t hide any deep philosophy, but they’re put together with quality and hold up on every count of rock correctness.
The Slovenian-foreign team works. There are years of experience, know-how and craft here, which show above all in delivering short, punchy, in-your-face rock material. The arrival of The White Stripes changed a lot on the rock scene. If you also listen to The Rolling Stones, hang out with friends like Turku Romantic Movement and Neil Leyton, and rock a Mando Diao haircut, you can hardly miss the target.
Izak Košir, as the main man behind the project, has managed to put his finger on exactly what needs highlighting in his original songs. The singing is solid, with a centrally placed vocal that, in some of the lower-pitched passages, even successfully borrows from Iggy Pop, as in If You Were Mine or Cigar Superstar. Otherwise, his voice has a melancholic edge, and his simple but punchy delivery is the factor that never, not for a second, strays into the dead end of clumsily disguised, empty verse-stringing.
The musicians skillfully fend off the danger of the predictable song structures sliding into the monotonous boredom of “heard it all before”. They do it with touches of xylophone and/or the bitter wailing of slide guitar solos (Emerald Green), as well as the delightfully clever minimalist moves caught by the trombone in The Death Of Romance. A decisive guitar phrase backed by a solid, potent dance “disco beat” in In Line also grabs your attention with ease. Here the musicians hit their target especially well with trivial and rational endings. The simple chord playing is dressed up with wah-wah, reverb and/or stereo chorus. Welcome studio cosmetics. We meet similar stuff to In Line in the retro, school-of-old The Dandy Song, where the whiff of Rolling Stones politics is back. The song gets its needed dynamics mainly from the keyboards in dialogue with the guitar phrase, which builds the right platform for the playful vocal harmonies of a female-male duet. The atmosphere of the album is melancholic and often dark, lazily dreamy, and the vocal occasionally “jumps out” in its approach, sometimes almost overly pathetic, as in the chorus of Cigar Superstar, which is otherwise one of the album’s better songs.
Looking at the album as a whole, we find it’s built from simple, predictable, short and punchy moves of the strict minimalism that the indie rock approach demands. The Toronto Drugbust have enough know-how and craft to successfully follow a bold compatibility that clearly ties together the musical story of this album. The album is a snapshot of the indie rock movement that has thoroughly flourished in Western Europe. “Enfant Terrible” is a hugely interesting, high-quality album for the Slovenian scene. It feels fresh and opens up a new playing field that’s only just starting to fill in the mosaic of the Slovenian rock landscape. After the latest album from Tide, “Regeneration”, The Toronto Drugbust is a project of real rock springboards, one that could promise plenty more interesting musical moves down the road and make itself noticed on the international scene too. Let’s let it seduce us as vividly as it did with the debut, in its future outings as well.
Lineup
Sir Izak K.O. – vocals, guitar, acoustic 12-string guitar, backing vocals
Tadej Košir – guitar
Mišo Drobež – guitar
Rami Helin – guitar, keyboards, backing vocals
Micke Ghost (aka Mikael Lundin) – guitar on tracks 8 and 9
Joonas Granquist – keyboards, backing vocals
Heikki Rasi – percussion
Juho Viljanen – trombone on track 4
Kate Hoskins – backing vocals
Nejc Kržič (Niezche) – bass guitar
Žiga Kožar – drums on tracks 3, 4, 6, 8 and 9
Martin Janežič (Buco)- drums on tracks 1, 2, 5 and 7, vibraphone on track 7
Production
Rami Helin
Tracklist
1. The Best of Me
2. The Dandy Song
3. Rated B1
4. The Death of Romance
5. Gimme Yours, Love
6. If you were mine
7. Emerald Green
8. In line
9. Cigar Superstar
