'Outdoor Lore' by Toadskin
Jeff VanDreel always wanted to write his own music.
It sounds easy enough, but VanDreel had typically played the role of the passive bass player in all of his musical endeavors. But as he got older, he realized he wanted more—and that his time to do so was running thin.
“We’re getting old, and for me it’s like, if I ever want to start writing songs, I’ve got to do it now,” VanDreel says. “All my friends are having babies and starting families and quitting music.”
But while others in VanDreel’s life are calling it quits and packing away the gig bags and road cases, he and his two cohorts, drummer Logan Byrne and bassist Trevor Broskowski, are just getting started.
Enter Toadskin: A sludgy, abrasive rock-and-roll trio that’s hot off the heels of releasing its debut album Outdoor Lore. With VanDreel picking up the guitar this time around and alternating lead vocals with Broskowski, the trio has released a collection of ten noisy songs that navigates the passing of time and how it correlates with the human experience.
Recording their Debut
Toadskin had just barely started playing shows when the pandemic hit in 2020. The immediate break in performing live allowed the band to hone-in on its sound and gave VanDreel time to acclimate to his new instrument. By September of 2020, the band was ready to release a self-titled demo—a six-track release, of which four songs would later appear on Outdoor Lore. It wouldn’t be until August of 2022 that the band would take those four songs and round out the track list for its debut full-length.
Recorded and mixed by Shane Hochstetler at Howl Street Recordings and mastered by Justin Perkins at Mystery Room Mastering, Outdoor Lore is a heavy trudge through the seasons, using fantastical and psychedelic narratives to tell its stories. It’s a hard-hitting album that never teeters into the realm of heavy metal, but instead teeters on the borderline between punk and heavier genres. The band expertly weaves ‘70s rock elements akin to Black Sabbath into a more garage-rock sound, topping it off with the abrasiveness of hardcore punk. Even so, starting off with “Sediment,” the album hardly ever lets off the gas.
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There’s enough here to please fans of most subgenres of heavy music. “Knives of Winter” is a five-minute slow jam that culminates in a guitar solo, but there’s also “Ice Age Trail,” a song that clocks in at just under a minute and is sure to incite mosh pits during the band’s live sets. There’s an element of Dungeons & Dragons dorkiness to the band’s storytelling as well—there are songs about castles and sorceres riddled throughout. But the band pulls it off in such a cool way that it doesn’t sound corny at all to hear VanDreel sing about licking frogs and crawling in a basement—it instead takes on a looming and powerful sonic form.
“We’re trying to find where we fit in—we’re too sludgy for the punk bands and too metal for the punk,” VanDreel says. “But we’ve found some great bands that we love playing with and some great places that we like to play at.”
Growing older is finding where you fit in with society and then locking into that role. In a way, Toadskin fights against that natural trajectory to a societal norm with its amorphous sound—much in the same way that VanDreel and company chose not to give up playing rock-and-roll music. Even the name of the band is meant to be interpreted however you want, whether you read it as Toad’s Kin or Toad Skin is up to you. It’s rock-and-roll that checks all of the boxes, without pushing the envelope too far on any particular genre trope. And yet the band still manages to make that sound its own.
But if you’re the kind of listener that needs music to fit into a neat genre package, then VanDreel has you covered.
“It’s Toadskin music,” VanDreel says.
