For about two hours at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall last night, it was the early ’90s again, and everything was all right. Toad The Wet Sprocket had come to town to play their 1991 album, fear, in its entirety, followed by their other well-known tunes.

There’s been much talk about the death of the album in the digital age. Still, the format remains the primary way that artists continue to deliver new music, even if consumers now have the option to cherry-pick tracks (singles or not) as they wish. And today, current albums are regularly re-released with new tracks — sometimes enough to constitute an entire second album — making them less a snapshot in time than a constantly morphing body of work. Couple such sprawl with a contraction of time that frustratingly only increases as one grows older, and forging an emotional connection with an album is that much more difficult. The album hasn’t died, but it sure is different these days.

In that respect, hearing Toad The Wet Sprocket perform the 21-year-old fear was revelatory (it was also my first time attending one of these kind of gigs). Twelve tracks long, their third studio album runs just over 45 minutes. With switching out of guitars and other gear, some chatter from the band (mostly about how they’d never played a couple of the songs live since recording them), and one false start to “All I Want,” last night’s real-time run of fear stretched to an hour, tops.

I hadn’t heard fear in years. My sizable collection of Toad The Wet Sprocket CDs (albums, singles, EPs, promos) is tucked away where I can’t easily access it, and though streams are now conveniently just a click away, frankly I’d forgotten how much the Santa Barbara, California band had meant to me. Going into the evening I knew how much I once loved fear — I did purchase concert tickets, after all — but I didn’t expect to experience so many distinct memories as Toad played the album’s dozen songs. There was the pair of radio hits that everybody and their brother knows, “All I Want” and “Walk On The Ocean” (both Billboard top 20 entries), but I discovered I’m equally hardwired to other ten too.

The album’s closing track, “I Will Not Take These Things For Granted,” brings fear to an epic, emotional end. It also served as its fifth and final single. The song’s message — a mantra, really — is applicable to so many things, from a favorite album (specifically) to life (generally), and is worth committing to heart all over again.

Tonight, Toad The Wet Sprocket returns to the same stage to perform the follow-up to fear, 1994’s Dulcinea, from start to end. If you’re at all a fan of the album (or the band) and live in or near San Francisco, don’t miss out. (Plus, it’s ages 6+, so you can bring the kids if you can’t find a sitter.)

But lest you think Toad The Wet Sprocket is satisfied with being an oldies act, the band did play two new songs last night and frontman Glen Phillips shared the news that pre-production on their first album in 15 years begins next Tuesday.

Purchase Toad The Wet Sprocket – fear via iTunes, Amazon MP3.