Twink, the Toy Piano Band! Twink, the Toy Piano Band!

Review of Supercute! from Performer Magazine by Carson Arnold

Finally, someone's done what I've been waiting for all these years: An adult children's album of nursery rhymes run by toy-pianos and driven with hi-pop techno music. Now we can all snooze away in automated bliss. The last time we caught up with Mike Langlie's interesting project Twink they were earning critical acclaim nationwide; the toy-piano kingdom (the professionally tuned toy-piano kingdom, I might add) finding comfortable spots as bubbly theme songs on various programs. Supercute!, despite its twenty-one tracks of derivative instrumentation that I'm sure leave the CEOs of Tyco quite amused, will grow on you - be it the hilarious version of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" or using a clip from the film Down By Law in "We All Scream (for Ice Cream)." Most of it's like the Easter Bunny on acid in Teletubbie land, or at least our best educated guess to be a child once again.

But no matter how metaphorical we put it, Twink isn't a joke band. Supercute! is the work of a mature, complex concept-album. Artistically, toy-instruments have always made history: John Cage wrote a prepared suite for toy-piano, Ornette Coleman would often play a plastic sax, and most recently, Radiohead's interest. Twink, however, seem less inclined to these visionary forms, but rather more drawn to creating entertainment of their own arranged looney-power.

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