Melted Toys
Melted Toys
UNDERWATER PEOPLES
7/10
It’s been a long three years waiting for Melted Toys’ delayed debut full-length. The release of their seven-song Washed & Dried EP for Underwater Peoples in 2011 joined, at the time, an impressive company on the small Jersey label, including Real Estate (as well as side projects from Ducktails and Alex Bleeker and the Freaks), Andrew Cedermark, and Julian Lynch, among others. In contrast to their Garden State comrades, Melted Toys originally hail from the Bay Area, and similarly to the rolling marine layer that permeates the West Coast, their music comes in dense waves and from a distance, both alluring and elusive. Very much like their UP labelmates, the band craft an impressive and thoroughly enjoyable kind of upbeat, laid-back pop. There’s only one Washed & Dried repeat on this twelve-song set: the gauzy and ruminative “Come On.” It’s there, as well as on a select number of standouts (“Blush,” “Always”), that the band cut through the haze and allow crisp melodies and focused rhythms refract the obscured vocals—leaving a lingering, sublime spectrum behind.
