In many ways, Welcome to Florida's first album, 2001's The Sunshine State, is their best. Deliciously devoid of the pitfalls and cliches that fame and success would help populate their later works, the band's debut is a lo-fi, low-polish, very low-budget masterpiece. Pieces such as "Dinero" and "The Wedding Song" are musical diamonds that have yet to be unearthed and adored by the listening public at large. So overwhelming is the genius of this 38-minute eargasm that any real WTF "fan" would hardly even consider the more recent three albums to have even been created by the same band. In fact, the players themselves seemed to have devolved as artists as well as people since the release of State. The drug addictions of Wes and Reilly, in particular, have contributed only an unfathomable mountain of valueless non-songs to the band's catalogue. Certainly, then, The Sunshine State epitomizes and embodies all of the once unmarred characteristics that gave Welcome to Florida so much promise only a few years ago.
For the follow-up to their first outing, Welcome to Florida released Fresh Squeezed in 2002. Recorded in Brookline, Massachusetts, a mere walking distance away from the famed Museum of Fine Arts, this sophomore effort proudly displays the band's love and admiration of the masters of both classic and contemporary visual art. Each piece, in its way, creates in the mind of the listener a sensual spectacle the likes of which no single visual medium can match. Indeed, after a few listenings, the album begins to display a subtle yet noticeable Du'Ressardieauxian quality. While some music experts might contend that such a decidedly vision-centric artist (the man was, after all, hard of hearing and smelling) could never be discussed in the same paragraph, let alone sentence as a work of music, Fresh Squeezed enhances and emboldens, if not proves, the argument that the lines that separate the arts are continuously fading, if not vanishing. In short, the album is one of, if not the most truly artistic productions by this young band.
2003's Get Into the Grove is probably the band's most accurately named album. For the recording and mixing of each of the seventeen tracks, Welcome to Florida got literally into a grove located in picturesque El Maha'la'sanaratapafa'a'ano, Mexico. The locale proved to be as ripe as its multitude of fruit trees, providing the band with some much-needed and much-appreciated sweet and tangy inspiration. Through the use of metaphor, WTF managed to keep all of the songs fruit- or fern-related. Songs like "You Make My Quince Wince," "The Juice Is Loose," "Forget This Party, It's a Regular Banana Harvest In Here, You Know What I Mean?," and "Forget This Party, It's a Regular Banana Harvest In Here, You Know What I Mean? (Remix)" expertly and efficiently translate all of the fun and zest of a trip south of the border into sound waves. Get Into the Grove is arguably Welcome to Florida's best album to listen to while pruning mango bushes, sucking grapes, or squeezing melons.
2004's Arrive Alive captures the band at its most uninhibited and experimental, largely due to the influence of a whimsical "Take A Chance: Lose The Pants" novelty sign that was put up in the studio shortly before the boys started recording. The album features a great many supporting musicians and vocalists, all of whom contribute to the work's grandiose sonority. Arrive Alive is also a milestone for WTF in that it contains the first appearance of a hidden track; "The Tom Weaver Song," considered by some band aficionados to be the album's quintessential Tom Weaver tribute composition, aptly embodies the colloquiality and flustessence that the band's youthful vigor lends to their music. On the reverse end of the spectrum, the album's opening piece "Musings of a Macabre Malfeasance" conveys through its somber tone and instrumentation perhaps the most undiluted and dissempectiated musical statement on political power that any group in past decade has offered.
WTF's newest work is The Good Word, though fans of the band have already given it the nickname The Good Album to acknowledge that it is, in fact, the first release by the band that is actually listenable.