Toy Matinee Jonesboro GA

Toy Matinee

Toy Matinee

Reprise Records, 1990

REVIEW BY: Duke Egbert

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 01/18/1999

Sometime in late 1990, I remember hearing a single that was oneof the catchiest, tightest songs I'd heard in a long time, called"Last Plane Out," by a band called Toy Matinee. It stuck in my headwell enough that even though I only heard it once or twice, Ipurchased the CD immediately upon finding it used seven yearslater.

It was one of the smarter moves I'd ever made. Toy Matinee onlyever produced one CD, but that CD is a gem of progressive pop andworth digging for. The band was a cooperative effort betweenkeyboard player Patrick Leonard (a former producer for Madonna) andSan Jose, California musician, composer, and producer KevinGilbert. Gilbert, a musician who spent several years on the edge ofstardom, is best known as the person who discovered Sheryl Crow andas being a member of her "Tuesday Night Music Club." Despiterecieving a grammy for "Leaving Las Vegas" and co-writing seven ofthe eleven tracks on Crow's debut CD, Gilbert could nevercapitalize on his talents, and died in 1996 of autoeroticasphyxiation.

The only term that one can come up for this is "shame." Gilbertwas respected among his peers as a brilliant lyricist, and on thisCD he and Leonard produced nine tracks of clever, intelligent, richpop music, music good enough that it's a mystery exactly -why-Gilbert was never a success.

The CD starts with the layered vocals of "Last Plane Out", apowerful anthem about the world and its downhill path, and doesn'tstop until the hauntingly sweet ballad "We Always Come Home". Inbetween, Gilbert and Leonard hit obsession ("Things She Said"),wistfulness ("Toy Matinee"), loss ("Queen Of Misery"), and the painof never quite fitting in ("There Was A Little Boy"). And it's notall emotion; the musical gamut runs from dance to rock to ballad toalmost-blues. Gilbert was a producer, a composer, and anexperimenter, and it shows in the myriad styles on the CD, packedwith neat, almost Keith Emerson-like keyboard lines fromLeonard.