Toadies - Rubberneck

Rubberneck did not explode. It crept. Recorded in three weeks at a studio in Mendocino in the fall of 1993 with Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf producing and Andy Wallace mixing, the Toadies' debut came out in August 1994 and spent most of a year going nowhere in particular. Then radio picked up "Possum Kingdom," and the album kept selling until it went gold at the end of 1995 and platinum a year after that.

That song is still the calling card, and it earns it. Five minutes of coiled quiet-loud tension over a riff that circles like something in the water, with Todd Lewis singing a come-on that is either a boy at a lake or something considerably worse. It is named for Possum Kingdom Lake outside Fort Worth, and it reached the top ten on both rock formats while crossing into the Hot 100.

What gets forgotten is how strong the other ten tracks are. Thirty-six minutes, zero filler, running from the instrumental opener "Mexican Hairless" through the whip-crack of "Backslider," the swampy menace of "I Come From the Water," and "Tyler," a song about exactly what you fear it is about, delivered with total calm. Lisa Umbarger's basslines and Mark Reznicek's drumming give the whole thing a lean, mean bottom end that most of the band's post-grunge peers never managed. The comparison people reached for at the time was Pixies crossed with Metallica, and it is not far off.

Three decades on, this remains the definitive Texas alt-rock record and the one Toadies album everybody agrees on.