The Sandwitches - Our Toast
- Written by Kenneth McMurtrie
An image of chorines adrift in the Old West is readily brought to mind on the opening track of The Sandwitches’ Our Toast. The trio sing sweetly but nevertheless with a nervy undertone as the mildly sinister, Brechtian bar room piano tinkles away on ‘Sunny Side’. Welcome to a place where The Dresden Dolls meet David Lynch.
It’s not all implied weirdness and faint peril on this second album from the trio of Grace Cooper, Roxanne Young & Heidi Alexander as ‘Sleeping Practice’ is a pretty straight forward campfire song over the barest amount of acoustic guitar and wire-brushed snare. The louche, cocktail proffering gent on the album’s cover is a bit of a visual red herring in terms of the album’s musical content in the main but fourth track ‘Dead Prudence’ does achieve a beguiling, late-night-small-stage-red-velvet kind of ambience. The last drunks have paired off and made it onto the dancefloor to slowly circle around for what might be the night’s final number but the chap in the smoking jacket’s still happy enough to serve up one of his ‘special’ Martinis.
Perfect for soundtracking either the last half hour of your dwindling house party or the entirety of your Sunday come down this is an album where the vocals manage to reach the heights but not to a histrionic degree, the music succeeds in being comforting yet melancholic and understanding & you’re left with the feeling that this is where you wanted to get to and it’s alright to do it all over again now that you know where you’ll land.
What, from its title, you might assume to be the more upbeat highlight of the album as a whole, ‘Wickerman Mambo’, is unfortunately a minor letdown (Summer Isle doesn’t get the Cuban treatment) and in ending the album rather sidles quietly offstage, albeit with those chorines maybe rather more certain than they were at the beginning of the affair that their fates aren’t sealed.
