If you happened to read our review of Frog’s Kind of Blah, or our interview a few weeks later, you’ll probably guess that we’re big fans of the Queens band. In what turned out to be a rather long piece, we got stuck in to the quite brilliant writing (somehow managing to avoid quoting the lyrics in their entirety) and came to the conclusion that:
Kind of Blah is America, the U S of A in eleven songs – quirky, joyous, breathless, exhausting, addictive, heartbreaking and downright weird, accelerating towards a distant horizon while keeping its eyes firmly on a halcyon past that sure seems like it should have been more fun
Little did I know that Frog released a self-titled mini-album back in 2013 on the now defunct label Monkfish Records and, luckily for those of us late to the party, Audio Antihero have stepped up to the plate and re-released the record.
Frog might sound a little different from Kind of Blah, but anyone expecting the rough début of a band getting to grips with their sound and style is going to be very surprised. Each track is just as detailed and clever as anything on the follow-up, setting down Frog’s exciting modus operandi. Take opener ‘Ichabod Crane’, a perfect example of their frantic lo-fi folk rock packed to bursting with odd and strangely affecting lyrics. “Head chopped off like Ichabod Crane,” he sings, “oh the things I’d do again. Tongue hacked out like Helen Keller, oh if I could only tell her”. It’s the weird blend of violent suffering and nostalgia that constitutes many a history, and here its delivered which such veracity you can’t help but get swept up in the flow. The striking similarities to country are unmissable yet somehow you get the impression these songs come from another lineage entirely, as if shaped by similar forces and pressures to good old cowboy music yet no more related than a dolphin to a fish.
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‘Arkansas’ features a First World War of dead entertainers and punk kids on stretchers, a sad song of the desperate kind, while ‘Jesus Song’ rises from the ashes like a half-drunk phoenix, or rather like a Jesus Christ if he fronted beach bar country band and sounded like Stephen Malkmus. ‘Nancy Kerrigan’ slows the tempo, the narrator facing a present trauma while trying to seek refuge in the past, trying to wrap himself in the nostalgia-drenched memories and Honest-To-God American images which promise to save us. It’s the saddest song you’re likely to hear for a good while.
“If I could afford it
I would record this
on your mother’s organ
you left back in Oregon
and I put your face
coming through the drapes
stick you in between the lines and the bass
and all the houses we pass will have American flags
and all the sullen sons inside will hug their dadsGod bless the state of Texas
and the Dallas Cowboys’ blue
I know darling he’ll protect usCan I venture an educated guess
have I had some part of your loneliness?
And we put our prayers in Nanny Kerrigan
we put our prayers in Nancy’s care”
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‘Space Jam’ is an unexpected Christmas bummer ballad, lost love and heartbreak dangling like decorations, ghosts of past and present swirling in cold night (“Its Christmas time I think so and the air feels just like home”), while ‘Rubbernecking’ is a grotesque drive down into the darkest parts of contemporary psyche. “Last night I fucking killed a man” he sings like some forgotten face from Less Than Zero, “and you know it didn’t change shit”, although the primary emotion is hardly one of detachment. Instead, the narrator seems to revel in misery, in imagery, in death. There’s no obvious meaning, no message or denouement, just a wacko cranking his gears through a vast landscape of boredom illuminated with sparks of terror and dread.
You can buy Frog now from the Frog Bandcamp page, including a rather nice cassette. For those of with with an eye for a bargain, you can also pick up a digital download bundled with the vinyl edition of Kind of Blah for £12. 