After waiting a goodly while for Wooden Wand’s excellent new album Clipper Ship, James Jackson Toth has surprised us with a second full length release, Toth’s Law.
It is a collection of songs which were, for one reason or another, not included on previous releases. Not because they weren’t good, but because according to JJT ” I think of every album as a fish tank. As anyone who has ever cared for fish can tell you, some fish simply don’t get along with other fish, and thus cannot coexist in the same tank. You may have two very fine, very beautiful fish, but if they’re going to kill each other, you must separate them. The songs on an album are like the fish: they need to get along. This is why merely believing a song is “good” doesn’t necessarily guarantee its inclusion on an album, because when songs don’t get along, the discord between them is audible.”
He goes on to say “Toth’s Law is the most recent of such collections. The songs herein were all written and performed by me at home, often recorded the very day they were written. They are rife with the problems commonly associated with home demos: corny drum machines, lousy solos, syllabic placeholders where better lyrics might have gone, and other gaffes. That said, you will hopefully find them as easy to listen to as they were for me to write. I hope all of you like some of them; my guess is that none of you will like all of them.”
Makes sense (though we anticipate we’ll probably like, and grow to love, all of them), and if it means that every now and then we get a round-up of Wooden Wand songs that weren’t able to get along with songs from previous records then all the better.
Listen to a couple below and Buy Toth’s Law from Bandcamp here.
Follow @madmackerel
