• Listen at: www.myspace.com/tobythefugitive
• Available on: Amazon MP3, eMusic

Toby The Fugitive is a four piece band out of Clarksville, Tennessee that has neither a Toby nor a fugitive, but does have a whole lot of awesome. Although the band draws heavily on pop-punk tropes, the end product is a highly stylized rock album that has been stripped of most of the overwhelming sentimentality that has defined pop-punk lately.

On first listen, it would be easy to ignore the truly outstanding musical work and focus almost entirely on Casey Carstens’ vocals. The opening track, “Lab Rat,” is delivered with so much intensity the lyrics are almost incomprehensible. On the rest of the album Carstens dials it back a bit, but even on Proxima Distort’s slowest song (”Demi Moore”) the vocals emphasize style and intensity over melodic conventions. The album is split by the title track, “Proxima Distort,” an instrumental piece a bit too long and way too aggressive to be a called an interlude. The song gives the rest of the band a chance to take over for a bit and show off. I’m the wrong person to really analyze guitar and percussion work, but the sound is definitely bigger than a band this size has any right to. Despite the album’s stripped down feel, the arrangements are quite complex.

Standout tracks are “Burning Bridges,” “Description Of Sadness” and “Demi Moore.”