Golden Toad is the solo project of Al Brown, former co-creator of indie-psychers Japanese Television. He’s also made music videos for the likes of UNKLE, Lambrini Girls, Idles, and Deap Vally. His solo debut Unite The Worms happens to be released twenty years after the extinction declaration of the Costa Rican Golden Toad, the last confirmed sighting of which occurred all the way back in 1989. This Golden Toad, however, decided to hole himself up in a garage in the Garden of England last summer and set about concocting a psychedelic passage through shifting time, riding kosmische grooves and electronic festoonery along the way.
You can picture Al Brown, hunched over his guitar, lost in the hammer ons of eighth track ‘Creeper’ as they loop over and over again, a voluminous cloud of Kentish hashish billowing out of the window cracks. Whilst this carefully named song creeps, it doesn’t creep up on you. It creeps along, in full view of its predators, daring them with its shimmering edges.
And Golden Toad has got shimmering edges aplenty. ‘Time’, for example, is built upon a motoring rhythmic backbone, guided by a tight hi-hat that opens up, bringing in a bombastic crash as it breaks out in boisterous celebrations whilst Brown exchanges shouts of “Time” and “Sweat” with himself. It’s reminiscent of the explosive drums on ‘Saturate’ from The Chemical Brothers’ ’07 album We Are The Night. Even the thirty second quickie, ‘Mind Fuck’, isn’t without its charm. Electronic rasps blast and burst against rudimentary beats until the brief interlude is up.
In Andrea Arnold’s 2024 film Bird Barry Keoghan’s Bug hatches a get-rich scheme involving a toad that excretes hallucinogenic liquid if you sing to it. He goes through an array of pop hits, including ‘Murder on the Dance Floor’ and Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’, trying to find out what stimulates it best. Bug ought to have united the toad with these worms, taking it on the chemically slurred journey of fourth track ‘Three Kings’ and its fourth dimension-warping rhythms. Amidst a twisting bassline, the drums slip into half time, and the guitars go off for a wander outside before traipsing back in with muddy boots and a little distorted bite to their bark.
There’s a sense of claustrophobia looming over Unite The Worms yet, whilst the headspace is packed out, the instruments seem eager to explore, to seek space beyond the sonic confines. Cymbal crashes ring out like keys dropped on a glass table during ‘Dive In’, sending the synchronised guitar and bass striding out into the unknown with it. ‘The Metal Collector’ somehow descends deeper into a murky swamp, consisting of the woozy, tapped gear that often unspools from Tom Boogizm’s studio.
Album closer, ‘A Humble Death’, with its Balearic guitars swooning over steady-clicked beats, is the sound of the sun rousing a slumbering figure laid out by the pool. It’s classic Kent. If Kent happened to be geographically relocated to the Mediterranean. In contrast, the penultimate track showcases a different side to Brown’s Golden Toad, with pride coming before the fall. This noisy take on Mark E. Smith’s formula features the arrogant claim “I Am A God” knowingly delivered in an unconvincing falsetto, as if the extended time in the garage has caused Brown to go a little wonky, so he’s trying his best to persuade himself of his own prowess whilst hoofing through a suitably repetitive post punk shuffle.
Similarly, the title track implies the existence of a full band whilst also reiterating that this is the focused work of a one-off individual slowly sinking into their own bottomless funk. The synths wobble and squirm about, combining with shredded fretboards to give an impression of the titular worms exposed and wriggling upon a bare pavement in the sun, shaking the clods of earth from their concertinaing segments.
A local pub – The Toad – serves up a beer called Toadlicker. It’s a zesty pale ale zapped with grapefruit and dished out in cans adorned with the daubings of daft and inexplicably popular artist, David Shrigley. His cartoony approach is mirrored here in both the album artwork and the sound palette of ‘Chasing Bliss’, which feels like the Fat Whites trapped in an underground bunker and forced to subsist on little more than 16mb side-scrolling video games. That or it imagines a world where Kyuss didn’t give two hoots about guitars and, instead, grew up hazily tripping and rolling through the desert shingle of Dungeness, the barely perceptible throb of the nuclear power station soundtracking their every move.
Hand-tapped rhythms gel with echoes of triggered snares on ‘Get Out’. A rumbling bass synth slapped through a delay pedal and an array of percussive tchotchkes are added to distorted vocals that sound like they’re being blurted through a pile of sopping wet bed sheets.
‘Winder’, on the other hand, is akin to the end of the afters. It’s all twitching legs and pasty jaws with the sun poking its way in. Intruding, even. Until it’s the one thing that you want, no, need to keep you grounded. But even that starts to twist away. Hit the bed. Ride it out. Wait for your heart to calm and a dribble of sleep to creep its way in. Don’t be fooled by that pumping tempo, this is Golden Toad winding down.
They say that the early bird gets the worm. It follows, then, that the late worm avoids getting eaten up. Landing at the eleventh hour/twelfth month, these particular worms are fashionably late. But in their psychedelic, timeless state, they’re ripe for devouring and deserve to be gobbled up like they’ve been lured out of the ground by the bumping beats of webbed feet.
