3 out of 5

Label: Spaceflight Records

Produced by: Steve Albini

Just so you know – I’ve been chilling with Toadies for a while. No, I can’t claim to have been rocking out this whole while, as Rubberneck got piled in to “popular music” via my naysaying back in the day, and I had no idea what was happening with Feeler before Hell Below/Stars Above came out, but when the latter did… I clocked it. The gloomy artwork felt pretty bold for a group that had kinda fallen off the radar for most, and instead of necessarily trying to repeat their previous hits, I felt like they went a bit deeper. Requisite “where are they now?” best ofs / live albums followed, keeping the good times alive, but I was further impressed by the eventual new material on No Deliverance as sticking to what the band knew without sounding stale. There were relative ups and downs on the semi-regular stream of albums thereafter, but I was never disappointed.

I’m not a Steve Albini stan. If anything, the opposite: I’m a bit wary of how Albini influences an album’s sound; for as much as I’ve loved some of his recordings, depending on (in my imagination…) how hands-on he wants to be, and how hands-on the artist wants him to be, you get things that do or don’t take advantage of the legendary producer’s skills in whatever ways. Meaning there are times when he was functioning as a work-for-hire where I feel like a newbie band emerged with some of their best sounding, boldest work; or the opposite – they sound like a grunge or post-rock clone; and similarly for seasoned acts, where they may try too hard to get that Albini sound, and end up playing in a way that just, I dunno, doesn’t actually land, even if it “sounds” good.

Take a band like Toadies, who were 100% indebted to acts like The Pixies whose sound Steve Albini surely helped shape in some way, then insert a few decades where Toadies turned that influence into their own thing, then drop them back into the lap of that influencer: and you get The Charmer, an almost upsettingly milquetoast release that sounds exactly like Toadies playing covers of bands who recorded with Steve in the 90s.

My wariness had me pretty turned off by this approach: every good single on The Charmer (and there are several, including the title track) feels like they’ve been ultimately diminished by the group / Steve wanting to take advantage of Electrical Audio and this moment to, like, add something else – something from a Pixies song, or a Shellac moment, and it moves the song out of the rootsy rawkness of Toadies into something more predictable; less exciting. I appreciate that this project spun up from the pandemic, which is maybe more of an impact than I realize – accounting for it’s more muted nature; the less exploratory / playful lyrics than usual; the music’s veering toward the “safety” of its genericness – but instead of that adding a type of underbelly, it just… I dunno, remains all the things I just said: safe; generic.

After several, several, several more spins: yeah, it’s a good disc. It’s not not how I’ve described it still, but if I squint my ears – sure. I’m still bobbing my head to Toadies-sounding beats, and singing along to Vader’s tempered howl on catchy choruses. I’m not quite clear how my wariness made me react more negatively than I was expecting, except I guess I was thinking the group would lean in to trying to rock harder, and instead they just leaned in to sounding more like the grunge knock-offs I think the band was initially accused of being. I happen to like grunge, and Toadies and Steve are also obviously really good at making that kind of stuff anway.