Kind of Blah, the new album from Queens-based duo Frog, is the sort of album you can get lost in. Packed with a plethora of details and pop culture references, the band created a vast, sprawling world which seems to exist in several generations at once. As we explained in our review back in May:
“The album takes on the appearance of a bustling city – or rather several versions of the same city superimposed over one another – overwhelming in its detail, home to everything and more”
In other words, it is the sort of album you want to talk about. Luckily, the band (and their great label Audio Antihero) were willing to hear us out and try to give us a bit more information on what Kind of Blah means to them.
Jon: Hello Frog. How is life in Queens for amphibians this time of year?
Frog: Life in Queens is great! This is a beautiful time in NYC. Queens in the springtime is a completely different place than it is in the winter.
To my ears, your music seems to draw equally from country music and garage rock, but which would you say you lean toward? In other words, would you say you are a countrified rock band, or a pair of agitated Hank Williamses (or neither)?
When people ask things like this, I never really know what to say because I’m constantly trying to listen to new kinds of things or old kinds of things I’ve never heard before and incorporate them into the band’s ideas. Hank Williams is probably my favorite singer of all time, though, so I guess he’s definitely a big constant influence. The band we were in before Frog was pretty strict folk/alt-country, so in a lot of ways the first record was sort of a rebellion against that; we were finally getting to play loud and scream loud, and it was really fun! Lightning Bolt was also the first band we ever saw together in college, and they’re definitely another influence.
I feel like a major part of the Frog sound is us figuring out how to try to incorporate all the kinds of music we want to play into the band’s bag of moves, which is by necessity garage-y, because we’re both not that good at being a rock band, and because we’re very resistant to add any other members or to try to create music that we couldn’t play live in some way. Part of the band’s ethos, part by necessity and part by choice, is to try to boil down every arrangement into only the most necessary parts. By scraping away all the froth from our tracks, we’re trying to create music that will still sound just as good as it does now in 50 or 100 or 500 years.
Country music songwriting is definitely something I’ve also been interested in for the past few years. I love the way they present emotion, and I love the way that every hook is a pun. I love puns. All my humor is coming up with puns.
I made a bit of a fuss about the album being recorded in a disused bowling alley. How did that come about? Was the room recognisable as a bowling alley? I mean, were you tripping over balls and pins?
The practice space that Tom and I rent used to be a bowling alley, but now its just a moldy, disgusting place with horrible bathrooms and terrible soundproofing between rooms. But its cheap! If you listen hard to Kind of Blah, you can hear some really loud metal riffs from next door in the quiet parts. I’ve always wanted to find a quiet space that I can make noise in, but thats really difficult to find for anything reasonable in the city.
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In a way, Kind of Blah reminded me of a motif that a number of my favourite authors (Don DeLillo, Stephen Wright et al.) use – the narrative is interspersed by sounds or images from the television so that pop culture is constantly bleeding into the scene. Is the pop culture stuff in your music inspired by anything in particular? Or is it just an unconscious product of growing up in a world of TVs and computers?
I think that the pop culture references in the songs are just a product of me trying to write how I live. My subconscious is filled with big, lit-up Friendly’s logos and McDonalds parking lots, just like yours is, because that’s what makes it real. I think attempting to describe real situations in songs works well because most people write songs with these huge, sweeping, non-specific descriptions of emotions. My memories are of specific things, listening to Jagged Little Pill with my mom, going to 7-11 with my idiot friends; we didn’t just go to any store, and we didn’t listen to just any record, it was those specific ones, and I think that’s important because it immerses you in the image in a much deeper way.
Stephen King in his book ‘On Writing’ says that he was looked down upon because he wrote specific names of brands in his novels, rather than generic ‘shaving cream’ or ‘shampoo’. He thought that if these idiot reviewers actually looked into their own medicine cabinets and saw generic ‘shampoo’ instead of Pert plus or Selzen Blue, then perhaps it was a valid criticism but only then.
As a British person who reads your books and watches your movies and listens to your music, I felt familiar enough with a certain idea of the USA to state that “Kind of Blah is America… quirky, joyous, breathless, exhausting, addictive, heartbreaking and downright weird.” As people who live in America, would you say this is a fair comment? Is it as varied and incongruous as artists would have me believe?
America is an interesting place. There are incredible things about it, and there are horrible, horrifying things about it. I think the thing that’s really interesting about it is that it’s not just one place, it’s a huge number of different cultures all put under one roof.
Queens is the most diverse county in America, and maybe the world. Kind of Blah is about living here, in this city, which is sometimes incredibly wonderful and other times feels a lot like prison and most times probably both at once. I’ve been living in and around NYC my whole life, and never really left for more than a month or so. I think the record is also a lot about people’s ideas of a place clashing with the reality of the place; Jesus Montero walking around the Bronx and longing for the way it used to be, Judy Garland’s death as a catalyst for the loss of 1940s era American values. In that sense, I thought that quote was quite fitting, because although you might have all these crazy ideas about what living in New York would be like, I can guarantee that it’d be way different if you decided to move here. But in any case, I took it as a huge compliment! Thanks buddy.
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Your album has some killer lines and verses, to the point where my review was almost just a block quote of the entire album. Difficult question: what is your favourite line/verse written by someone else in music? Which do you wish you could have written?
I’m a big Silver Jews fan, so pretty much anything on Natural Bridge or Bright Flight. I really like the song “Tennessee”,
“Good bye all you truckers and steady bad-luckers
I’m off to the land of club soda unbridled
I’m off to the land of hot middle aged women
I’m off to the land whose blood runneth orange”
What a great band. I also really like the song ‘Dallas’, which starts with David Berman passing out on the 14th floor and noticing that the CPR is erotic. ‘Glowing cum buckets in her ankles’ is the last line of the verse. He’s a real badass. I met him once, and he told me that although he liked my music, I should quit being a musician because there were too many bands. Good thing I’m stubborn!
I couldn’t go through an interview with a band called Frog without a stupid frog-themed question… who is your favourite famous/fictional frog? Kermit? Frogger? Frog from Frog & Toad?
The best frog in existence has always been frog from Chrono Trigger, whose real name is Glen. You can peep him here:
[Still annoyed that Chrono Trigger never got a UK/PAL release – Jon]
Finally, could you name four or five artists you are enjoying at the moment? They can be friends or enemies, old or new, whatever you find yourself returning to.
Paul Whiteman & his Orchestra – Great arranger, Great music, but what a I really love his how he uses vocals. So many harmonies! Amazing.
Charlie Parker – Mostly because of Phil Schaap, the WKCR DJ. I’ve been listening to the complete Savoy and Dial sessions a lot lately, at the end of the 1st disc is the session that he did when he was strung out and had to be held up to the microphone. Pretty legendary! I think he went home afterwards, burnt down his hotel room and was sent to a mental institution. The tunes are pretty incredible though.
Kendrick Lamar – Guy is great! At first I thought he was just a straight Andre 3000 impression, but if you get over that he makes these insane, visionary, sweeping records. People don’t make albums like this anymore, if they ever did.
Lightning Bolt – I know I already mentioned this but they are really amazing. So many great riffs and such great drumming. This is the best rock and roll made in the past 15 years.
You can buy Kind of Blah now from the Audio Antihero Bandcamp page. We suggest that you do so sooner rather than later.
Photography by Andrew Piccone, artwork by Benjamin Shaw