35 Years Later: Toad The Wet Sprocket’s Jangle Pop Sound Develops Acutely On ‘Pale’

Fans of the R.E.M. guitar jangle may have rejoiced with the 1989 release of Toad The Wet Sprocket’s debut album Bread And Circus. With the issue of Green the year prior, the idiosyncratic Georgia quartet had begun to digress from the bedrock instrumental style of guitar/bass/drums/vocals for more elaborate productions (taken to an even further extent with 1991’s Out Of Time and the very next year’s Automatic for the People).

In the meantime, with the release of Pale on January 16th 1990, Toad consolidated the stylistic approach so reminiscent of their peers’ Murmur. The Santa Barbara California band thus set the stage for its future breakthrough to the mainstream beyond the alternative demographic within which audience they had first become so firmly anchored. 

Like its predecessor, Pale is comprised of original material such as “Torn” and “Corporal Brown,” insinuating tunes written collectively by vocalist/guitarist Glen Phillips, guitarist Todd Nichols, bassist Dean dinning and drummer Randy Guss. While the superficial instrumental and vocal anonymity of “High On a Riverbed” and “Liars Everywhere” is debatable, it’s also hard to miss the subliminal eccentricity of the band, which took its name from a skit by the British satirist Monty Python. 

Such subtleties barely crept to the surface on the aforementioned TTWS debut on their independent label Abe’s Records. In contrast, during the recording of the sophomore effort, the band signed with Columbia Records (which also re-issued the first album), but declined to do any re-recording in the wake of that transaction. Instead, the LPs and its predecessor (before reissue on the major label), were mastered to polished but hardly antiseptic effect by Brian Gardner at Bernie Grundman’s facility.

Comparisons abound between Toad The Wet Sprocket and R.E.M., but the former distinguishes itself in a discernibly nuanced manner. For instance, while Phillips’ lead vocals are slightly better enunciated than early Michael Stipe, his mumbles dissipate almost altogether for the choruses of songs like “Come Back Down” (the meaning of which becomes amplified by including all song lyrics). 

Meanwhile, instead of a murky density, plenty of space abides between the instruments of such cuts, allowing them to echo in the air and surround the singing. Consequently, scant echoes of the uncredited piano during “High On A Riverbed” plus the touch of accordion on “Chile” pique listeners’ curiosity, as does the vigorous acoustic strumming on “Nothing is Alone.”

In addition, concise tracks like “Don’t Go Away” benefit from a smattering of background vocals plus simple and to-the-point guitar fillips from (presumably) Nichols. Arrangements of such tunes are, in fact, so inextricably bound to the material the band did not deign to appreciably expand upon them in live performances of later years after their initial breakup in 1998.

In contrast to the blurry cover artwork (including photographs by Alan Messer), the clarity of the sonics throughout Pale consolidates Toad The Wet Sprocket’s collective persona as quiet but deceptively staunch outsiders. Like R.E.M.’s initial appeal, such understated iconoclasm no doubt resonated with the alternative and college audience with whom the foursome found favor via their earliest music. 

But an even wider audience embraced the band’s third long-player, Fear, largely through the mainstream success of two singles off that album, “All I Want” and “Walk on the Ocean” (the latter was also featured prominently in film and television). The first commercially successful record for Toad, selling over a million copies and certified platinum three years after its original September 1991 release, was nevertheless bereft of overt compromise. 

Such multi-leveled recognition accounts at least in part for the group’s longevity, the extent of which has come to include a latterday effort wryly dubbed Starting Now, issued exactly thirty years after the breakthrough record. Toad The Wet Sprocket’s sound has not changed much in the three and a half decades since Pale came out. However, in maintaining such a recognizable style, the foursome has only reaffirmed the value of the fundamental rock and roll instrumental lineup.