Best Wishes - Toothpick Elbow |
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Copyright © 2001 Toothpick Elbow More Spiritone releases... |
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About the CD
Produced and Arranged by Todd Westover
Visit the Toothpick Elbow website
Toothpick Elbow is one of those incategorizable masterpieces that comes along only once in a while to trance us out in such a beautifully primitive style. Kinks-influenced in a neo-gothic-meets-new-wave type of way.
Graphic artist and musician Todd Westover, the founder of Toothpick Elbow (Los Angeles, CA), has been closely associated with Spiritone since it's inception, designing many of the Spiritone CD covers and appearing on all of the Wisconsin Collection CDs.
"Toothpick Elbow is a unified masterwork by a prophetic, rough and tumble songwriter who is just barely scratching the surface of his massive talent."
- Popsmear magazine
"Something of an underground LA supergroup led by ex-BellRays drummer Todd Westover (he produced and wrote the bulk of the tunes and plays several instruments), Toothpick Elbow throws down a heady blend of glam, punk, blues-rock and psychedelia that invites comparison to artists as disparate as Bowie, the Kinks, Jon Spencer and The Fall but ultimately sounds like nothing else. At once primitive and crafty, Westover and company turn the neat trick of making body music for the mind, kicking your ass as they mess with your head.”"
- Demo Universe
"...The genius of Best Wishes lies in the crazy-quilting of the band's influences -- glam, psych, folk and good old rock. Toss in some crazy moog and some freaked-out electric piano and you have a 21st Century flower-power rock album. Toothpick Elbow evoke rock without bludgeoning us over the head with it. For rock-n-roll diehards such as myself, who usually want to be bludgeoned over the head with a screaming riff, this technique satisfies the same desire, but in a new and interesting way; they’ve replaced brute force with cunning and texture."
- Spledid Online