Additional personnel: Elliot Smith (piano).

Recorded at Sunset Sound, Los Angeles, California in March 2000.

Personnel: Todd Lewis (vocals, guitar); Clark Vogeler (guitar, piano); Elliott Smith (piano); Mark Reznicek (drums, percussion).

Audio Mixer: Andy Wallace.

After a six-year hiatus, the Toadies finally released their second album, Hell Below/Stars Above, in 2001. If 1995's Rubberneck was a pretty heavy album, with guitars swimming in a post-grunge murk, Hell Below/Stars Above finds the band trudging through primeval sludge, awakening the ghosts of heavy metal past. Songs like "Little Sin" evoke hard rock deities Soundgarden, and throughout the release, lead singer Todd Lewis adds plenty of Robert Plant/ Chris Cornell-style high-pitched syllables to counterpoint the "Hammer of the Gods" rhythm section bassist Lisa Umbarger and drummer Mark Rezinek endow the album with. Besides "Little Sin," highlights are the adrenaline rush "What We Have We Steal" and the requisite pseudo-ballad "Jigsaw Girl." Hell Below/Stars Above isn't all that original, but it's nirvana to some headbangers in an era when rap-metal was the only metal played on the radio. ~ Mark Morgenstein

The Toadies' first album since their 1995 RUBBERNECK finds the band with a new guitarist aboard, but otherwise stylistically unchanged. This is alt-rock that doesn't sound like all the other alt-rock out there, mainly because the band has a knack for stringing together simple but devastatingly effective rock hooks.

Witness "Motivational," whose "get your head around it..." chorus doesn't really go on for several hours, merely seeming to because you can't get it out of your mind (the concluding drop down to a distantly heard Spanish radio station is a particularly good trick). Perhaps because lead singer Todd Lewis is the son of a Baptist minister, some people claim to hear religious imagery or themes in his lyrics: if there are any here (as in, perhaps, "Little Sin"), they're pretty oblique. Pick hit: The title song, which mates buzzsaw guitars and punk attack to the cutest Queen style harmonies you've ever heard.