"Toad The Wet Sprocket - Welcome Home: Live"

This show was recorded live in 1992 in Toad's hometown of Santa Barbara, California. It came right on the heels of their successful Fear album, which contained the radio hits "Walk on the Ocean" and "All I Want."

The record finds the band in fine form, performing several cuts (8--almost half of the album) from Fear and about half as many from their first two albums, Bread & Circus and Pale. The remaining two tracks are the non-album cut "Brother" and the then-unreleased "Fall Down," which would appear on 1994's Dulcinea. The band give each song an excellent reading, performing with energy, humor, warmth, and precision. The audience seems equally enthused about the new material as they do with the older, more familiar cuts.

The best thing about Welcome Home is that it does cover this early period, right at the beginning of Toad's creative and commerical high point. Their work is much more polished than when they began on Bread & Circus, but it still contains a certain ragged charm that their later albums (like Coil) seemed to lack.

Though everything on this disc is worthwhile, the highlights are "Walk on the Ocean," "Torn" (introduced by Glen Phillips with an audible smirk and the words "and now a song about clinical depression"), "Chile" (my personal favorite from Pale), Fear's "Butterflies" (which features a medley with the Beatles' "Within You Without You." Anyone with the balls to do something like that--and actually pull it off--has to be impressive), "Brother," and "Know Me," which features a different introductory snippet than the album version found on Bread & Circus. The only drawback to the record is that it maybe leans a little too heavily upon the material from Fear; I'd have liked to have heard more from Bread & Circus, such as "One Wind Blows" or the beautiful "Covered in Roses." But the songs here are excellent and well-performed, reminding you that this criminally-overlooked band deserves some respect and attention from any music fan with a discerning taste.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Toad the Wet Sprocket, "Chile (Live)"