I was perfectly happy assuming that Switzerland was all about cheese, burning down gambling houses and Celtic Frost, until I heard this rather cool album of early stonerrific heavy rock. Released in 1972 by a little-known Swiss band, this album is the real deal for fans of Budgie, Blue Cheer, Human Nature’s ‘Stoned Guitar’ album and all the gloriously sloppy, opiated music that’s still being crafted in their wake.

I can’t find much information about Toad, even on these here inter webs, so I’ll concentrate on the music and leave out the historical footnotes (you can clap now). The music certainly deserves attention. The central element here consists of groovy, fuzzed-out guitar riffs that Tony Bourge would have been happy to call his own, backed by drumming that is rock-solid, and gets hyperactive in the best Keith Moon/John Bonham tradition. There’s a kickass bassist who plays lines that are often considerably faster and with a more crunchy tone than I’d normally associate with the era, and always do more than just plod along with the root note. Finally, the singer has just the right raspy, keening voice for this sort of music.



The album opener, ‘Cotton Wood Hill’ shows clear nods to the Big Three British hard rock/heavy metal bands. But it has enough sense of identity and killer riffing to keep it interesting, even if the lyrics are incredibly cheesy meditations on how great it would be to be a bird. ‘Life Goes On’, the longest song on the album, stretches to a whopping 11 minutes and 58 seconds, but it never feels that long as it builds from spacey, acoustic-based passages to groovy, mid-tempo riffing. The guitarist has a nice cranked-up pentatonic molestation thing going, muddy enough to keep it real and lucid enough to keep the listener awake, and the excellent rhythm section keeps things cooking with just the right mix of supportiveness and flash – even the drum solo beak on ‘Pig’s Walk’ (a song with especially sparse and laughable lyrics) goes on for just long enough to induce some mad grooving, but not long enough to descend into the usual exercise in aggravated rhythmic assault. ‘They Say I’m Mad’ is the bluesiest jam here, but it isn’t the sort of slavish exercise in Hendrix/Cream derivative jamming that mars so many 70s hard rock albums, instead it distinguishes itself with a will to heaviness and an engagingly silly, and totally earnest lyrical exploration of insanity. ‘The One I Mean’ is an acoustic excursion, short and to the point, in the tradition of those little hippified squibs in between the mammoth jams on an early Budgie album, and reminds us that the band has a softer side, too. There are equally good shorter songs interspersed amongst the epic jams – ‘A Life That Ain’t Worth Living’, the instrumental ‘Tank’, which alternates gigantic power chords and fiery leads and should be a required cover song for aspiring stoner bands, and the excellent, slamming album closer, ‘Stay’. It isn’t as if there is a mind-blowing amount of unprecedented virtuosity on display, but these guys had the right feel and approach, and I’d have been perfectly happy even if everything was extended into a mammoth jam.



Definitely a keeper. If you’ve got any more Toad albums, do me a favour and send them along, will you?