Shiny Toy Guns

     

Oklahoma is a state known for its violent weather.  Every year, the population must face an onslaught of storms so violent, they threaten the very existence of the cities whose paths they cross.  Facing this reality, most who inhabit this area seek to learn as much as possible about these threats…and a special few go so far as to seek out and intercept these monsters for either the thrill of the hunt, or for the advancement of scientific understanding.

Meet Jeremy Dawson who, along with longtime friend, music collaborator, and fellow Oklahoman Chad Petree, formed electro synth-pop group Shiny Toy Guns alongside their usual hobby…of placing themselves in the paths of giant wind vortices!  Their sophomore effort with Universal Records, Season of Poison, is set to turn the world of electronic rock on its head.  The debut single, “Ricochet,” aided in building the momentum for the album’s release on November 4, 2008, helping the band obtain top spins on none other than Los Angeles’s own KROQ and other radio stations around the country.

Season of Poison, as explained by Dawson (keyboards), has a concept directly tied to the chaos and violence of the weather they grew up with in their home state.

“Season of Poison is about uncontrollable things that can be gently directed to effect life.  Weather is a prime example.  Humans are unable to affect it, but we can still heed warnings and get out of the way.  You’re still going to lose your home, but you can work to deintensify the negatives.  The negatives, however, are temporary, much in the way that a season is temporary.  So take everything I just said literally, dynamically, and metaphorically and smash it into a lyrical melodic rock electronic album.”

This is the essence of Season of Poison and, in a larger sense, the essence of Shiny Toy Guns itself.  The humble roots of this group, beginning in the stormy fields of Oklahoma in the late ’90s, brought Jeremy and Chad across the United States with various projects, but also across the pond to the U.K. and Europe, composing and touring with multiple electronic acts, including Tiesto and Paul Oakenfold.  The DJ scene wearing thin on the duo brought them back to their rock roots, and to Los Angeles, to go forward with the latest incarnation of their mixture of rock and electronica in Shiny Toy Guns.

“Chad and I had always been in rocks bands,” explains Dawson, “and we were so sick of the electronic scene, so we figured why not merge those two elements, since we were still big on electronic music itself.  We’ll get a drummer…and a girl to sing.”  So the guys teamed up with drummer Mikey Martin and vocalist Ursula Vari and began touring across the States.  After parting ways with Vari, the band hired Carah Faye Charnow and recorded the independent release, We Are Pilots, on an $800 Dell computer.  This album would go through two additional revisions — the first seeing the album completely re-recorded, then the second and last revision re-mastered once the band signed to Universal.

We Are Pilots gained the band some well-deserved notoriety, even going so far as to earn them a Grammy nomination for Best Electronic/Dance Album, however, losing out to The Chemical Brothers (a noble loss, considering the infancy of their career).

Having a successful album, tours, and a Grammy nod under their belt, you would think Shiny Toy Guns would be content with the upward momentum and the solidity of the current line-up.  While the contentment may have been great, it was certainly not enough to keep vocalist Carah Faye Charnow in the band.  A true moment of contention for the group, opinions vary widely as to whether Charnow left on her own accord or whether she was forced out.  The dispute and contradictions given by the band and Charnow herself gave rise to a veritable drawing a line in the sand with fans coming down on the side of loyalty to Shiny Toy Guns as a whole, or that of their now former vocalist.

In any case, the season would change once again in Shiny Toy Guns with the inclusion of new vocalist Sisley Treasure.  As it turns out, Treasure, back in 2002, was the original consideration for vocal duties.  Quoth Jeremy: “She was in a band called Cooler Kids who were signed to Dreamworks at the time, and if you know the way the wind blows with major record labels…even though her band was on hiatus, she legally could not join our band until the contract with Dreamworks was up.”  So, as the wind blows, once the band had severed its ties with Carah, Sisley was free to begin her work with Shiny Toy Guns as their lead vocalist.

Treasure has her roots not only in music but also in film and choreography.  Her dancing abilities could be seen in full on her prime-time television debut as a contestant on CW reality show The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search For The Next Doll.  “We’ve all done really stupid things in our life,” according to Dawson in response to their singer’s involvement in this most awkward of career moves.

Shortly after Sisley’s addition, the band recorded their first fully funded album with Universal which would eventually become Season of Poison. After the recording of the album, Shiny Toy Guns would head to the wilderness of Tennessee to shoot the music video for the first single from the new effort, “Ricochet.”

“We shot the video in an old Civil War-era goat farm. We had to march the equipment trucks through tangled briars and really, really heavily forested areas. And the best part about filming the video was the artist commune close by, populated by thespians and visual artists who just live out in the mountains in isolation, so we were able to utilize their brains and artistic talents while we were making the video.”

Now that Season of Poison is seeping into the veins of the larger population, the band has been touring the states in support. Their journeys will soon bring them to Europe closer to January, and any talk of future plans has been put on hold while Shiny Toy Guns promotes hard for the advancement of their cause. Dawson hopes to be filming a docudrama soon with Chad called The Sky Warned You, about their love of tornado-chasing, placing the humanitarian aspect back into the art, and emphasizing the search and rescue piece, which will recall the days when storm-chasers served a purpose instead of building armored tanks and driving head-first into an F-5 for dramatic effect.

Fans of Shiny Toy Guns can rest assured that the foursome will be very busy in the foreseeable future and seemingly in many different mediums. Keeping the fusion between dance music and rock alive, the group will continue to leave the landscape of pop music changed like the storms that predictably visit the Oklahoman plains every season.