WHAT HAS BEEN SAID/WRITTEN ABOUT JAMES TOTH AND THIS RELEASE SO FAR:

JAMES TOTH "Demon Stations" LP (Feral Child Recordings)

Over the last two decades, James Toth’s circuitous and chameleonic capabilities have allowed him to serve up songs in a range of flavours (Crazy Horse-laced languor and churn, Sticky Fingers-tinged gospel and roll, psych-rock, acid-pastoralism, weathered twangy country, bedroom folk and more), under a variety of collaborator-aided guises (including Wooden Wand, Dunza, James & Giants, his own name), that have found a broad spread of label abodes (Fire Records, Kill Rock Stars, Three Lobed Recordings, People in a Position to Know, The Great Pop Supplement et al.). Throughout it all, Toth has remained a voracious home-recording devotee, sketching out tracks for later fuller studio treatment or documenting pieces just to capture their very existence, that have been dispensed digitally, as bonus discs, on one-off lathe-cut singles and through sporadic rarities round-up anthologies.

Importantly though, there is little or no discernible quality downturn for such informally manifested material, and at times the DIY constructions in fact represent possibly the most gratifying routes into the labyrinthine James Toth canon.

More than welcome then, is the freshly unveiled Demon Stations (Selected Home Recordings 2012-2022), the latest nugget-panning curation exercise from this distinctive Toth tributary, following on from 2011’s much-loved My Week Beats Your Year LP and the six-platter Archives Volume 3 boxset.

Sagely selected for corporeal vinyl appearance, from five different Bandcamp-only compendiums, by Feral Child Records mastermind Dom Martin, these eleven gathered cuts coalesce into one diverse and deeply satisfying stand-alone album-sized compendium. Although unpolished, these are far from being hissy four-track tastings or thin smartphone voice memo scrapings. Instead, we have convivial and textured mid-fi presentations of songs packed with plenty of pathos and playfulness.

Hence, at the more minimalistic ends, we’re treated to some whimsical troubadour essays (such as the wry well-observed Loudon Wainwright III-esque “Too Many Bands” and “Everything I’ve Lost”), mesmeric If Only I Could Remember My Name David Crosbyisms (“Stones”) and lovelorn Townes Van Zandt-like reflections (“Love Me While I’m Alive”). Elsewhere, in the moderately more fleshed-out passages, there’s also much pleasure to be had from the Loaded-era Velvet Underground chug of “Mama’s Boy”, the Highway 61 Revisited attractions of “Bad Habit” and the mid-70s Stones-style balladry of “Dilated Eyes”.

Threaded together with consistently rich melodicism and refreshingly distinctive wordplay, Demon Stations is unquestionably one of the finest James Toth releases to date, regardless of the disparate origins and sonic fidelity of its component parts. Longtime followers and late-comers will be equally and heartily rewarded.
(Concrete Islands)

“James Jackson Toth’s got that picaresque quality that Dylan had in his heyday, wherein the shambolic narrator undergoes various travails and epiphanies—harrowing, bleak and darkly comical—in the course of a narrative, then leaves you mystified, both smiling and sad.” - Michael Gira (Swans / YGR )