Toe

The Long Tomorrow

When they came to Hong Kong in 2008, Tokyo four-piece instrumental rock band Toe gripped an almost-full house at Grappa’s Cellar with their stupendous, percussively led instrumental soundscapes. That four men could create such a complex sound with three guitars and a drumkit was fuel for enough gobsmackedness to last the entire gig. That you consequently got lost in the tides of emotion set forth was only further reward.

That set was in support of Toe’s last release, the New Sentimentality EP, the band’s slow-arriving follow-up to their outstanding debut LP, The Book About My Idle Plot On A Vague Anxiety (the album is as much of a trip as the name) from 2005. Both those efforts had the band reaching into deep emotional territory, pouring out streams of riffs and broken-up chords that washed over each other and
were urged onwards by popping drums to create sensory heaven.

If there’s a major difference in For Long Tomorrow, it’s in a move to more defined niches for each note, as the band favours a clean, crisp sound over rocking out. There are more instruments, more effects – though, thankfully, the touch is still light – and three tracks feature vocals, including Say It Ain’t So, which, in a big sidestep for the band, is basically a soul track. Crowd favourite Goodbye gets a proper recording with female vocalist Toki Asako, whose wistful singing wowed the Fuji Rock Fest when she appeared with the band on one of the big stages in 2007. The result is an album that retains Toe’s intricately arranged melodic sense of inward journey while making the band more accessible to a mainstream listenership.

So where to from here? The warbling brass and erratic African rhythms in penultimate track Our Next Movement provide the album with a dash of experimentalism – one wonders if this is something of a hint.

Hamish McKenzie