Album Review: The Toadies – Feeler

Concept: The grunge one-album wonder’s unreleased 1997 second LP has a 2010 rerecording release coming up, albeit missing eight of the original seventeen tracks. I happen to have a copy of the original lying around in pieces here and there, so with a torrent of the redo proving extremely hard to come by at the moment, consider this a sort of preview-review hybrid.

Sound: The 1997 Feeler is unmastered, the mastered copies having been lost shortly after their rejection by Interscope Records. The major consequence is that the backing guitar is so faint it might as well be missing. Assuming this will be remedied in the new version, it will be the next best thing to Rubberneck, possibly the most underrated rock record of the 90s. If Toadies don’t ring a bell, picture a missing link between The Pixies and Alice In Chains. Their sound never strays far from this. The greatest appeal of the band apart from their loose meter and brisk riffs was the emotion of Vaden Lewis’ rich, drawling, androgynous bellow, which is at its peak form in Joey Let’s Go, Waterfall, Dead Boy and the breakdown of Suck Magic. The tracks which have been stripped from the 2010 release are nothing special. Twitch and Tornado would have sounded cliché in ’97 apart from the latter’s lead guitar line, and they seem terribly awkward today. Clarkesville, Your Day, and Littlefish are listenable, but not that memorable. Another three songs were transferred to their 2001 flop Hell Below/Stars Above. The only track remaining on the new version which deserves to be cut is the dull, lazy, and disorganized City Of Hate.

Lyrics: The best explanation for Toadies’ unpopularity relative to Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, etc., would be their perversity, that lingering-outside-your-window-with-binoculars-and-a-knife vibe which they don’t even try to conceal. The elements of personal history and religious shame elevated Lewis’ sincere if twisted passions on Rubberneck and helped to place it above the bands’ other surprisingly crappy albums. The lyricism was already in decline in the recording of this album, and unfortunately the best writing (best song?) of the bunch isn’t present — the bloody yet hilarious Send You To Heaven, passing from hokey country rock to spacey slow jam to hyperbolic hardcore thrashing: “You know I thought for a while I had me an angel/ the way your eyes lit up when you smiled / but twenty miles or so of the Beatles and the Stones/ I’ll send you to heaven and have some peace and quiet./ Maybe I’ll send you to heaven and you will still be mine.” The only writing that doesn’t put a dent in its song somewhere down the line is the cocky, straightforward Dead Boy.

Quick And Dirty: A slight extension of the glory days of grunge, with the more general impression of the 90s tagging along. A little thickheaded, but managing both legitimately fierce and tender moments. (♦♦♦½)

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