If you were born the last time Toad the Wet Sprocket released an album, you may just received your driver’s license but the band recently reconvened and will be releasing their new album in the new reality in the new millennium, through crowd sourcing (their Kickstarter has already been funded but if they reach $250,000 by Sunday, all backers will receive Live EP from their August Tour). For those born before their time, Toad the Wet Sprocket was a college rock band in the age of alternative music, more R.E.M. than Smashing Pumpkins. Yet the same year, R.E.M. relented to the times and made its grungiest album ever with Monster, Toad stayed the course and made their best album of their career, Dulcinea which is this month’s induction into the Scooter Hall of Fame.
Granted by today’s standard, Toad the Wet Sprocket could be considered Dad Rock with mellow songs like the album opener Fly from Heaven, the plaintive Windmills, the playful Nanci, and the moody and retrospective Something’s Always Wrong. But to show you just how out of touch they were with the agro guys of the time, I remember the local disk jockey pronouncing the title “Dull-Cin-da” once even in front of the band during an interview. Apparently the guys at the alternative rock station were not familiar with the Don Quixote love interest.
That is not to say Toad could not rock, though they never went full agro, there was still some heaviness to songs like Woodburning, which may have been the closest thing the band themselves ever got to grunge. The best song on the album was the one Toad song that would not sound out of place in a mosh pit: Fall Down. The frantic track verges on paranoia and anxiety as we transitioned into the mid-nineties, but the song never lost control which many of the alternative bands of the time would have done. The upcoming album New Constellations may not live up to Dulcinea, but it is good to have Toad the Wet Sprocket back on the scene.
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