Toy (Toy:Box)

Heavily bootlegged over the years, Toy is an album David Bowie recorded in 2000, right between Hours and Heathen. The concept was simple: Bowie took his touring band into the studio to revisit a bunch of songs he wrote and recorded prior to becoming a superstar. Although "Shadow Man" comes from the Ziggy Stardust sessions, most of the songs date from the days before "Space Oddity," so they're grounded in British rock & roll and mod R&B -- a far cry from both his glam rock of the 1970s and the electronic-inflected art rock of the 1990s. It isn't too far from the classy classicism of Hours, though, yet it carries a looser, lighter feel. Hearing Bowie apply the overly polished aesthetics of Hours to swinging, moddish material is odd but appealing. He and his band have fun with the material, diminishing some of the stilted tweeness of the originals and revealing the nice compositional bones underneath. It's a record out of time, with the songs clearly from the swinging '60s and the production being very much a product of the slick Y2K era, yet that's also its charm: it's Bowie revisiting his past from a particular perspective that is as of its time as the original songs.
Toy is a slight record but it was given a weighty official release in 2022 after first being unveiled as part of the 2021 box Brilliant Adventure. Along with the proper album, there's a disc of alternative mixes and extras -- here, the main attraction is a version of "Liza Jane," his first single -- then a disc of "Unplugged & Somewhat Slightly Electric" mixes. All the alternate mixes, including those unplugged versions on the third, are only slightly different than the original mixes, making the deluxe set somewhat monotonous. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine