33 rebellions per minute
1991
Toad The Wet Sprocket, FEAR
A quite good album, FEAR is nonetheless a strong case for truth-in-labelling enforcement. "Toad The Wet Sprocket" is obviosuly a name for a silly band, like "the Swinging Erudites" or "Maestro Subgum" or "((Mystic Knights Of The) Oingo) Boingo". Confusingly contradicting this, FEAR is clearly New Wave proto-goth, a title for an imitator of circa-1980 Cure or Joy Division; or, perhaps, for a death-metal band still underpracticed at the genre's rhetorical overkill: FEAR as the latest album from Injury Angel or Bikecass or Napalm Really-Bad-Blister. So what is this record? Jangle-rock! The Conells meet AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE, or Adam Durvitz humbly fronting Counting Pigeons, or Let's Active on a Let's Brooding sort of day! The songs are varied, with a strange organ part on "Is It For Me", earcatching drums on "Butterflies", piano on "Pray Your Gods", a hard-charging country feel on "Hold Her Down", a tense 2-chord strumming pacing "Stories I Tell". And Toad are a skilled ensemble playing intelligent well-sung songs, a fine ad for their genre. It's not a sheer letdown like GOD FODDER by Ned's Atomic Dustbin or TELEBLOODPRINTMEDIADEATHWHORE by the Federation Of Puking Squirrels (who ripped the album title from an Alice Donut song, but that should be a good sign). Still, Toad don't deliver what the packaging said they would. Sue the bastards.
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