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Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Dust Bin / Love New Music from Gavin Toler

Posted by Brendan Kiley on Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:37 PM

Hello, fellow members of the small Cult of Toler—you know who you are and about the many faces of its figurehead: he rocked you as the singer for Bainbridge Island punk-rockers Pud. He gave you dark thrills in Cold Way Walking and as the diabolical vocal half of the hazy, gothic-country-rock band Blessed Light. (Toby Gordon, the angelic-sounding half, is still playing as/with the Blessed Light, but makes no mention of Gavin or the infamous "lost record"—a bootleg copy still exists and gets passed around by Seattle fans—on his website.)

Toler then dove into Los Angeles and "California mystic folk" with Winter Flowers. That's all I heard of Toler for a few years.

But a friend just forwarded me some new Toler recordings released online late last year—he's still singing high and delicately, as he did with Winter Flowers, but some of the dusky, dark shadings of the Blessed Light years has crept back into his voice.

You can listen here.

(And there's yet another version of "White Pilgrim," the gorgeously melancholy song about addiction and madness that Toler has been playing and recording with his different outfits over the years.)