Army of Broken Toys a study in broken hearts
Walter Sickert and Edrie Edrie were playacting with broken glass the night before the Herald visited Edrie’s Allston flat.
“We put it in a bucket and stomped on it,” she confessed, after service of process a healthful bite of vegetables. “It made fun noises. We feature approximately studio time tonight, so we were trying come out different sounds to see what we liked.”
At that place is a curious blending of balefulness and morbidity in Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys, as the duet of Sickert and Edrie are called. They garnish their ominous doom-folk with the theatricality of a demonic carnival company. Past performances suffer included storytellers, fire-eaters, glass-eaters, contortionists and, of line, Edrie’s broken toy u. S. Army.
Though she crapper play real instruments, she opts for an armory of gizmos that includes child-sized pianos, drums, cymbal-playing monkeys and prophylactic stuff toys. Regular army of Broken Toys is possibly the only band ever whose identify can be taken literally.
“It’s non like other people haven’t played with toys in front,” Edrie said, “only our special blend of toys against the juxtaposition of what the songs ar about, I opine, brings a lightness to things that could be darkness.”
Primary election songster and singer Sickert met Edrie five years ago, when he joined a Cambridge creative person collective that Edrie helped run. In the tradition of personal cataclysm begetting good music, they didn’t truly bond until their significant others ran away with for each one other deuce age ago.
“Once Bruno Walter and I mat comfortable talk to apiece other (about the situation), he sent me a song he had written about it,” Edrie recalled. “As I was listening to it in my railway car, I started to sing harmony to it. So I called him on my cell earpiece. I had to perpetrate over, ’effort I was tears and I american ginseng. That’s sort of how the band formed.
“Instead of hunt mass knock down and killing them, genuinely savagely, with hammers and screwdrivers, we made a record,” Sickert added. “That was a lot better for us.”
No dubiety. Euphony is constantly to a greater extent constructive than bump off, and that proved in two ways true for Sickert and Edrie. Since the Army of Broken Toys’ origination, they’ve delighted and alarmed audiences across the world. With the coating touches being put on a newly EP, their view looks downright sunny. Certainly, this volition upshot in cheerful, upbeat, Paddy Mouse Club-style Ground forces of Broken Toys songs.
Or possibly non.
“I call back that when that happens, we’ve plausibly jumped the shark,” Sickert said. “When we’re happy all the sentence, and in that respect ar no issues or problems in our life, what are we going to write about? I should pay the consultation $100 an hour.”
“Thank you for the therapy,” Edrie quipped. “Goodnight.”
Bruno Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys, with Dean Martin Bisi, Black Fort of Opium, What Time is It, and Mr. Fox, at the Middle East, Cambridge, Tuesday. Tickets: $8, 617-864-EAST.
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