Review Summary: Does anything but waste your time.
How to find an album to listen to? We have reviews, recommendations, encounters in press, on the TV, radio or the Internet. One way is to just come across the artwork and say “yeah, I need to check this out”. I’m a sucker for comic-style drawings so the cover of
Toxic attracted me like a magnet, and it feels like I struck gold with this one.
Although it’s not quite the pop-punk record I expected it to be.
Yours Truly
used to be a more straightforward pop-punk band, but on this album they leaned far into alternative rock and post-hardcore influences. The end result is an explosive cocktail of excellent songwriting with nigh-on excellent execution. The vocals are sweet yet powerful, stretching from loud, biting alt-rock performances to a few breeds of pop passages. Coupled with strongly effective tension maintenance by the drummer and a load of menacing riffs always lurking somewhere in the background, it constitutes an ideal foundation for songs to be built upon.
The band made a perfect use of the record’s less than half an hour runtime by injecting it with dense and invariably hooky compositions. The opening “Back 2 U” tells it right away: it’s fast but doesn’t feel rushed, the verses and choruses come in changing iterations, the vocals are slightly desperate, highly charming and penetrate the brain like gamma radiation. The frequently returning quirky spoken passage becomes an immediate point of interest and exemplifies another key trait of
Toxic: each track has a specific recurrent motif that gives it more individuality.
Stylistic differences contribute to said sense as well. “Sour” is the most aggressive track of the album’s first half, an emotion pushed even further by the furious screams and outright tenebrous mood of “Sinking”. On the contrary, “All That I’m Not” is driven by a precise synergy of symphonic impressions and vulnerable singing, being followed by a literal breakcore track and a dark, dynamic rocker. But then, a stereotypical pop-punk song emerges from out of nowhere. This is what I call a diverse tracklist.
So yeah,
Toxic is pretty much a pop-rock paragon to me. Or would be, if not for one additional substrate.
The instrumental mix is very satisfying, making the music transparent and spacey without solving its tightness. Vocal effects like layering and vocoders are dosed with care and restraint, punctuating certain lines without taking unnecessary precedence. But the immersion heavily suffers from low-pass filtering and disproportional loudness levels. Every single time Delgado opens her mouth, she sounds as muffled as if she was locked deep in a basement with the recording equipment put in the attic. On top of that, the loudness of her parts skyrockets during the choruses, thus destabilising the songs.
In spite of this criticism, I still think the few stupid production choices aren’t enough to outweigh the sharp songwriting and the performative qualities of the record. I can’t guarantee it will appeal to you as it does to me, but trust me when I say it’s put together extremely efficiently.
Toxic is half an hour of almost,
almost pure fun.
