Toto Through the Looking Glass 2002 (Capitol)
The band pay tribute to those that inspired them.
The Lowdown
The eleventh album from Toto
Through the Looking Glass named after the Lewis Carroll novel, would be a pure covers album and a cover album that would stay true by and large to the originals. Whilst the songs are accomplished covers of the originals as you’d expect from a band of Toto’s standing, the album has often been criticized as being a simple copy of these songs, rather than any attempt in reworking the originals in some interesting way.
The album is largely with material that you’d could expect to find with artists like Bob Marley, Steely Dan, Cream and George Harrison providing the expected. Other artists such as Stevie Wonder and Elton John are not overly surprising either, as these are artists that had formed part of the Toto inspiration. But the unexpected comes in the form of Elvis Costello here and Anteater in the chat explains that odd addition and surprisingly it’ one of the best covers. Vocalists Bobby Kimball and Steve Lukather do a competent job over these songs and long forgotten vocalist by this time on studio albums David Paich takes in a cover as well.
Like with any album of this style it’s really an album for any Toto completists out there and is really just an attempt by the band to show some of the artists that had inspired them in the first place. The general music listener might well find it more enjoyable though to dig out the well-known originals instead.