“American civilisation,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his 1987 book Hidden History, “[has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of people who were willing to believe.” Boorstin was referring to how British citizens were convinced to leave their shores in a pioneering search for religious freedoms and imagined riches, arguing, essentially, that a tendency to believe in advertising and propaganda was a prerequisite for the settlers. After all, you don’t pick up your life and sail across the world without feeling fairly confident that grass will be greener on the other side.
The phenomenon Boorstin described could be held as the prototypical American Dream, a feature of the continent that has persevered through hell, high water and civil war. If artificial selection led to a nation of Dreamers and Believers, then it is the descendants of these people that populate the music of Frog (AKA Queens duo Danny Bateman and Tom White). Frog’s posses the same genes and frame of mind, though have existed on the continent long enough to know that gold does not lie beneath their every dig site. The Dream is no longer alive but also not quite dead, a mirage on the horizon, a great, insistent spectre that haunts and delights in equal measure.
Their new album, Whatever We Probably Already Had It, is no exception. We featured single ‘American’ a few weeks ago, when we waxed lyrical about how it is “something of a primer for the rest of the album,” laying the foundations of a world “where every person is caught somewhere between laughing and crying.” The narrator of the track is caught in the aforementioned limbo, “locked between the unstoppable force of self-deprecation and the immovable object of the American Dream,” making for an “exceptional, ridiculous, transcendent despair” that is familiar to most every card-carrying Americans.
Centered on an illicit relationship conducted in by-the-hour hotel rooms, ‘Something to Hide’, feels like a collision of two such people, their too-large hopes crushing any possibility of true connection, while ‘God Once Loved a Woman’ grows from low-key and melancholy beginnings into something that burns with a fervour. As the title suggests, the song focuses on God’s fixation with one of His subjects. “I wanted God to act more like the ones they had in Greece,” Bateman told The Alternative, “when Zeus kept disguising himself as swans and pigs to have sex with human women.” It’s difficult to argue with the summation, the lyrics ostensibly concerning such a God, though it does nothing to capture the song’s genuine sadness, Bateman reduced to desperate yelps by the close, invoking pity for an all-powerful immortal being who overestimated the power of his dreams.
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Once the whistle-driven interlude of ‘Gimme Your Number’ has sauntered by, ‘Journey to the Restroom’ finds the narrator pinned between competing urges late at night, confused whether to eat or sleep or spew up his guts as images and memories swirl around him, like being stuck, drunk, in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, the billboards and news crawlers reporting facts from your life.
“She died in a restroom in midtown
I heard they had to break the door down
She died in a restroom on the ground
You’re never gonna make it now
Yes yes miss I deserve admiration you can call this number for more information
It’s a 3am, a free consultation, it’s a 1800 number here live in the station
Yes miss I’m the king of all of this shit
Call me Alec Baldwin of this shit
And I make it to Nepal if I have to crawl, fill these veins with alcohol”
Pivoting toward tenderness, ‘Bones’ is perhaps Frog’s most earnest, straight-faced love song since ‘Nancy Kerrigan’ back on their self-titled debut. The target of the narrator’s sincerity is left ambiguous, but whatever their role, it’s clear they cut a vital figure in his story. Here, mundane aspects are lifted to poignancy by hindsight (“We watched bones through the laundromat’s fumes in the cold,” for example), though any fondness in the moment appears to have been withheld. “Did you know that you are the guardian of a part of my life that I had forgotten?” Bateman asks. “Did you know that I’ve thought about you every year in the cold where the train rattles through? / And I never told you it’s just what I do.” ‘Bones’ is weird and sad, and sounds quite unlike anyone except Frog.
Weird and sad describes closer ‘Don’t Tell Me Where You’re Going’ too, a song slurred and sloppy but full of real feeling. Like ‘Bones’ before it, the song contains lines of total sincerity that feel disarming in the face of what has come before, as though the truth of things slips out in quiet whispers to oneself, the party over and room emptied out. The truth being the soul-shearing reality of the American Dream, the tragicomedy of understanding your dreams and desires to be complete fictions while leaning on them with all of your weight.
Whatever We Probably Already Had It is out now via Audio Antihero and you can get it from Bandcamp.
Artwork by Benjamin Shaw, cover photo by Alex Coppola