San Francisco quartet Melted Toys make dream-pop for the waking life. Drawing upon 1980s jangle-drone touchstones from Flying Nun to 4AD (and contemporary variations thereof), their songs are made of radiant colours, clean contours, and propulsive rhythms—but behind the immaculate exterior lies an unshakeable mental fogginess. The band’s self-titled full-length debut feels not unlike embarking on a morning rush-hour commute on just three hours sleep—a sense of feeling simultaneously present and absent. However, in this case, there’s no readily available grande Americano to shake you out of your somnambulant state.
It’s somewhat ironic that Melted Toys have found their most visible champion in fellow San Franciscan Christopher Owens, who invited the group to open dates on his Lysandre tour last year. Where Owens has established himself as the most guileless songwriter in America, Melted Toys mouthpiece Steven Harkins seems almost aggressively vague—and it’s not like the band's sound is so dense as to overpower him. While dream-pop is traditionally reliant on texture and haze, Harkins isn’t getting drowned out by noise; it's more like his mic has been dipped in a vat of Vaseline. In lieu of decipherable lyrics, he’s content to let the mere tone of his voice and the band’s expressive, often gorgeous guitar interplay do most of the communicating for him. (Or, failing that, they’ll just give the songs titles like “Bummed Out.”)
It wasn’t always this way: Melted Toys’ seven-song 2011 EP, Washed & Dried, may have possessed a primitive, demo-like quality and murkier post-punk aesthetic, but Harkins' words were, for the most part, easy enough to parse, and even introduced an element of playfulness to a normally dour subgenre. And yet the album’s most fully realized track, the Chills-esque “Come On”, was also its most emotionally ambiguous, with Harkins introducing the distant but affective vocal style that’s been promoted to the defining feature of the band’s debut. “Come On” has been re-recorded here, yet we’re no closer to unlocking the song’s secrets; it remains a silhouette, albeit rendered by a brighter, more powerful backlight. In contrast to Washed & Dried, this self-titled release (written following a sojourn to Japan and Taiwan) is more a case of Dried & Washed—Harkins is colouring between more clearly defined lines, but still using blobs and smears.
As per the standard set by “Come On,” it’s an approach that works best when the band tap into their latent sense of urgency (like on the early-R.E.M. drive of “Horizons,” or the “Ping Pong”-ed pop of “Always”), with the blurred vocals effectively serving as the vapor-trail exhaust to the band’s accelerated motion. But it can prove frustrating when the band slow down and stretch out: “A Postcard” boasts the album’s most beguiling groove, setting a shuffling funk to dew-soaked fretboard fills straight out of Mac DeMarco’s tiki-lounge beer cooler, but even in these more comfortably intimate surroundings, Harkins remains evasive. And when the emotional temperature turns more temperate (as it does on the album’s second half), the songs are simply left to coast on pretty guitar lines, shimmering synths, and breezy backbeats, perilously toeing the line between bliss and blasé. Like their namesake, Melted Toys’ willfully warped nature can get in the way of their utility.
