Bio
Toys That Kill come from San Pedro, California, the city where the freeway ends, where bullets fall from the sky on the fourth of July and where Mike Watt painted the name of his hometown on his bass and everybody started calling him “Pedro.” While it wouldn’t fit Todd Congelliere’s genre or personality to start chucking around words like “expert,” Todd and Toys have exactly figured out how to make a couple chords and a chorus timeless in a way that’s old and new all at once.
Congelliere was at the core of F.Y.P, the band he started basically with the lowest-budget drum machine and four-track recorder legally available in 1989 after sudden and intense exposure to punk by fellow skaters who’d come by to use his ramp and bring mixtapes for the boombox. (“Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, 7 Seconds, the Germs, Descendents—if it wasn’t for those bands, not only would we not sound like this, I probably wouldn’t be involved with music,” he says now. “I’ve always hated normal musicians and these bands were nothing like that.”)
When he started FYP , it was hardcore, but in the loosest sense—fast, pissed, aimed squarely against a world of teachers and cops and full-of-themselves idiots. But there was more going on, too—Minutemen- style wordcram and Descendents-esque melody snarled together with pitch-dark humor and strangely sentimental sarcasm, and by the summer of 2000, it was obvious that the band called F.Y.P was ready to become something else. So naturally, they did, playing the last F.Y.P show for hundreds of proud screaming weirdos in a cavernous bar in the Inland Empire and debuting the new deal at a since-bulldozed punk club in the shadow of the Port of Los Angeles the very next night. And so—the same way the Descendents changed into All—began the mighty Toys That Kill.
If you were there, you could tell this band was everything ex-F.Y.P-ers Congelliere and Sean Cole (now twinning Congelliere on guitar and vocals) had been saving up ever since. These were gigantic songs with choruses as heart-stopping as the Clash and a rhythm section—bassist Chachi Ferrara, drummer Jimmy Felix—so heavy it sank further into the stage every time the drums kicked in. (This is called the “TTK thump,” says Congelliere.) Toys had pop songs but pop songs broken at the edges, rock ‘n’ roll songs but rock ‘n’ roll songs with all the pose and pretension dissolved away, punk songs but punk songs that weren’t ever gonna burn out and crumble away. And so Toys That Kill revealed themselves as a band that could translate Thin Lizzy and the Buzzcocks, Cheap Trick and the Descendents, the Replacements and the Who and Elvis Costello and the Ramones all down to the same simple things—energy, guitar and heart.
Homebase: San Pedro, California
Label: Recess Records
