It seemed less immediate, less cohesive, and more inchoate than the previous album. Listening again, more than 15 years after its release and just as the band has announced it's completed recording of a new album, I still stand by my initial assessment, but with a few reservations.
Part of the problem is that a few of the best songs here were never released as singles. "Throw It All Away" is an instant-classic song of rebirth and renewal, and the song's advices are as assured as the confidence you can hear in songwriter Glen Phillips' voice:
Cause there ain't nothing you can buy
And there is nothing you can save
To fill the whole inside your heart
So throw it all away
"Throw It All Away" is the kind of song that gets rediscovered and re-recorded for a new audience or a new generation, and I would kill to hear it interpreted by a singer such as Gary Allan.
And although the song "Desire" is not typical of what had been established as Toad the Wet Sprocket's "sound," I would patiently remind Columbia Records that a little band from Georgia called Collective Soul had hit after hit with songs just like this one.
A punchy power pop song about a relentless wish to be something you have never been, "Desire" remains a forgotten gem in Toad's catalog.
I don't mean to imply that the singles that were released from "Coil" are in any way weak affairs; "Come Down" is the sort of energetic rock anthem that will have you singing at the top of your lungs as your foot depresses the accelerator more and more, and while the propulsive "Whatever I Fear" is a suitable album opener, it isn probably too similar to the band's previous work to grab anyone's attention.
"Crazy Life" - the album's third single - had appeared on the soundtrack to the film "Empire Records" two years earlier. Toad rightly included a retooled version of the song here and released it as a single. Although the song was sung by the band's lead guitarist Todd Nichols, there's no reason it shouldn't have gotten more attention then or now.
Which leaves a handful of songs that are, alternatively, either decent album tracks or filler.
Yes, filler on a Toad the Wet Sprocket album. Songs like "Little Man Big Man" sound trite and tired, and "Little Buddha" struggles (and fails) to rise above its bad lyrics, despite a string arrangement by the legendary Van Dyke Parks.
However, for every "Amnesia" riddled with vague meaning, there are songs like "Rings" and "Dam Would Break."
Dean Dinning's bass guitar stands front and center on "Dam Would Break," providing a loping yet solid bedrock for the inner drama of the song's lyrics:
What is this ice that gathers round my heart
To stop the flood of warmth before it even starts
It would make me blind to what I thought would always be
The only constant in the world for me
And every hours of every day
I need to fight from pulling away
And if my mind could only lose the chain
The dam would break
And Nichols' burbling guitar provides an urgent, resonating counterpoint to Phillips' terse lyrical imagery on the R.E.M.-inflected "Rings."
Listening today, I would say that "Coil" is a tastefully arranged collection of tunes, of a style that seems to have faded from mass appeal amid the dual onslaught of post-Madonna bravado and hip hop braggadocio. It stands as a collection of smart, melodic rock songs that still manages to rise above 1990s clichés, despite the Dave McKean sleeve art. Although "Coil" remains an uneven album, its strengths do outweigh its weaknesses, and the album will reward those who give it careful, repeated listens.
