Toy Band

Mandy Levy and Pete Ohs are trying to make your favorite band look like a bunch of chumps. And they’re succeeding. Granted, the duo — which performs as Toy Band — has a shtick. They play only toy instruments. As in the kind of flimsy plastic Panasonic crap you’d find at Toys “R” Us. Oh, and they have a ludicrously arbitrary purple-and-teal dress code. But they also kinda rock. The music is a tad rudimentary — they’re playing toys, for fuck’s sake — but the splendid simplicity of the Toy Band shows how high-gloss MTV pop rock can be distilled down to its laughably base elements without losing the music’s basic appeal. Levy and Ohs — classmates at DePauw University (shrug) — first hatched the idea of becoming toy soldiers on a whimsical trip to a Goodwill in Brazil, Indiana. Since then, they have taken their K-B compositions from the Whiskey a Go Go in Los Angeles to the Pop Montreal festival and many spots in between.