Written over the course of a single day in Astoria Park, ‘Wave’ originated as a journal entry exploring an ostensibly inexplicable sense of dissatisfaction. shepup might have had it all—a dream job lined up and a happy relationship, not to mention time and space to focus on creative outlets too—yet some nagging unhappiness remained. The resulting song unpicks such emotions with a drifting, shifting sound able to evoke a sense of ephemerality. As though coming to understand discontent as part of an ever-changeable system of internal weather. “What is a wave when you take away its water?” asks the chorus, invoking both the cyclical nature of the human experience, but of the invisible forces which drive its patterns.

Follow-up ‘Honey Barge’ also takes inspiration from the day job, drawing its name directly from a slang term for a sludge tanker (that’s a ship that transports sewage). It and uses the image as a metaphor for those trapped with the suffocating routines of an unhappy relationship. With a sedate rhythm and nostalgic vocals somewhere between reflective and haunting, the song becomes a meditation on opting for familiarity over true satisfaction, with sounds from the tanker and other maritime recordings woven into the arrangement. Watch the video shot by Ian Dickey and edited by Fiona Carlsen below:

Wave / Honey Barge is out now via Paper Moon Records.

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Nick Zanca doesn’t waste such an ambitious sound when it comes to the lyrical side of things. Hindsight takes on some weighty themes, focusing on personal experiences within a technocapitalist world to bring political and philosophical ideas into relief. Lead single ‘Little Professor’ explored neurodivergence, contemplating the pernicious attitudes so often faced by those diagnosed and looking to reposition the trait as something valued and celebrated, while new track ‘Takes Two’ turns its attention to romance and relationships. Namely the joy and challenges of those which break with traditional monogamy. “I was drawn to write this after coming to realize that not much music has been written about non-monogamous dynamics, let alone from an affirmative perspective,” Zanca explains:

Like any other form of love, the foundation of open relationships involves emotional labor of all walks: the navigation of jealousy, the attempt to unlearn one’s attachment styles and ego, and the promotion of personal freedom and transparent communication. Put more simply, this song reflects on what it means to put in the work for the people that you love.

Watch the video directed by Zanca himself below:

Hindsight will be released on 2nd August via American Dreams and is available via Bandcamp.

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The Fabulous Truth, the new album from Brooklyn‘s Eve Essex forthcoming via Soap Library, uses the full spectrum of styles and genres in attempt to offer the elusive phenomenon of its title. “Trip-hop, outlaw country, kosmische, spiritual jazz, avant-garde classical, and—yes—musical theatre,” are all cited as touchstones in the press release, as Essex moves with an improvisational freedom in search of a sound capable of capturing the full duality of intimacy and expansiveness which exists within the boundaries of our selves. The style is encapsulated by latest single ‘Room with a View’, in which a hauntingly patient sound evokes the strange geography of our interiors, where whispered secrets and vast expanses can feel like one and the same. Watch the animated video by Andy Cahill below:

The Fabulous Truth is out on the 21st June via Soap Library and you can pre-order it now.

Fine – Coasting

Recording under the moniker Fine (that’s feen-uh), Copehagen-based songwriter Fine Glindvad Jensen collides folk sensibilities with those of dream pop and electronic genres, stitching together guitars, drums, samples and synthesisers to form ambiguous, often minimal soundscapes for her vocals to drift across. So while debut album Rocky Top Ballads might be full of the melancholy and longing of classic country music, its intentions are far more evasive, drawing the listener into a shimmering world where ennui and fondness are marbled into one. The result, as highlighted by single ‘Coasting’, are songs whose apparent simplicity belies the true depth of meaning, Fine’s minimalist style allowing the listener to feel they are edging closer to the elusive heart of each track with every repeated listen.

Rocky Top Ballads comes out on 7th June is is available to order from the Fine Bandcamp page.

Hearsing – Montauk

Consisting of multi-instrumentalists Avery Murphy and Jordan Taylor, Hearsing look to offer a new flavour of western music by drawing on the surf punk roots of its founders (who were both founding members of the ensemble SUBPAR). The band have a new EP Pastoral on the way, and single ‘Montauk’ gives a glimpse of the expansive, nostalgic quality of the Hearsing sound. Ellington Peet (drums, percussion, synthesizer, production), Cole Brossus (lap steel guitar) and Kemper Thornberry (additional vocals) complete the line-up, helping to create a vivid soundscape which feels like a world of its own. Because as ‘Montauk’ suggests, Pastoral sees Hearsing push beyond personal experience into a more allegorical and creative style of lyricism, and it is fitting the sound comes to feel like an environment you might step inside.

I live behind a truck stop
North of Jersey
Every day I smell the sea
I work inside a steel mill
Cause veneration is better than defeat

Check out the video by Diego Diaz-Lundquist below:

‘Montauk’ is out now and available from the usual places. Pastoral is coming soon.

La Bonte – Marching In A Field Of Wheat

Following on from 2022’s Grist For The Mill, La Bonte is returning this summer with Economy Play, a new EP again released via Anxiety Blanket Records. Garrett La Bonte has made a name with a considered, reflective sound able to examine grief and love with the kind of thoughtful tone such subjects demand. Living up to its title, the new EP continues this sensibility with a measured hand, choosing to not overextend itself within an environment of financial constraints to instead deliver a shorter release that does justice to the ideas underpinning it. Single ‘Marching In A Field Of Wheat’ confronts this society of precarity directly, sparking with the tension between capitalism and creativity as it comes to understand the empty promise of the American dream. But while the less-is-more descriptor might apply to the release’s quantity, the sound refutes such ideals, rising with tumultuous weight as though directly wrestling with the malevolent forces within.

Mal Not Bad – Come On/Hard Times / Mustang

Following the track ‘No Worries’ back in March, Mal Hauser’s Mal Not Bad has released a new double single ahead of their debut full-length This Is Your New Life which will be released in August by Same Same. Described as “a succinct glimpse” into the record’s sonic palette, the songs inhabit slightly different sides of the LA artist’s style. ‘Come On/Hard Times’ is a sober slice of ambient indie folk adorned with subtle glitchy electronics, while ‘Mustang’ invites LA band Junaco along to create an emotive and haunting downtempo electro pop song. “‘Mustang’ feels like the emotional release of ‘Come On/Hard Times’, Hauser describes, “though both songs remain in moments of reflection and stillness.”

Find yourself inside a new life
Find yourself inside a different mind

Come On​/​Hard Times / Mustang is out now via the Mal Not Bad Bandcamp page.

Steak Blake – Under Knives

Next month, Blake Joshua (of Beige Banquet) will release an EP with his solo project Steak Blake. Titled This One, the record promises to continue the Steak Blake MO we first glimpsed on last year’s ‘Wonderbread’, all sharp post punk guitars, deadpan vocals and introspective, politically conscious lyrics. To announce the EP, Steak Blake has unveiled lead single and opening track ‘Under Knives’, a lo-fi but hook-laden punk song that is certain to appeal to fans of the likes of Gorgeous Bully. “The song speaks to the relentless challenges of modern life,” Joshua describes of the single, “depicting a state where people constantly feel behind and unable to escape from reality. It explores the psychological burden of believing that these struggles are self-inflicted, turning to vices as a form of escapism, a way to momentarily relieve stress and despair.”

STEFA* – differ3nt today

Born With An Extra Rib, the debut album by Queens vocalist, composer, educator and performance artist Stefa Marin Alarcón (aka STEFA*) is something of an amalgamation between autobiography and origin story. Exploring personal stories on a grand scale, the record sees STEFA* blend classical, electronic, punk and Latin styles to capture the different selves they embodied throughout its nine year gestation. Genre convention goes out the window, replaced with a sense of freedom and desire to embrace change. Latest single ‘differ3nt today’ is a great example, a downtempo electronic song that draws on contemporary pop and a decidedly 90s nostalgic sensibility. “I wanted this to feel like an anthem for people,” Alarcón describes of the song. “For everyone – not just for trans people, not just for non-binary people, not just for queer people. We all change so often and we have a right to change, so I wanted it to be an invitation for people to ask these same questions.”

Born With An Extra Rib is out now via Bandcamp.

Tasha – Michigan

Over two years since her last release, Tasha has signed to Bayonet Records and released a new single, ‘Michigan’. Produced by Gregory Uhlmann and written during a “both lonely and extremely creatively fulfilling” writing trip to a friend’s house in the titular state, the track is suffused with the sadness and gladness found in the warm glow of a late summer afternoon. Steady percussion propels things forward, but Tasha’s vocals glide at their own pace, attuned more with the slow rhythms of the natural world than our usual human calendar. “This song is about the missing and the return, Tasha describes,” the reliable comfort of a sunset on a nice day, a friend to sit with, and the shining hope of more comfort to come.”

Drive to Michigan, spend some time alone
Make good friends with the horses down the road
Oh I wish our dog was here with me
But I know he’s barking loudly somewhere warm and free

Wishy – Love On The Outside

Fresh from the success of 2023 EP Paradise, Indianapolis outfit Wishy have wasted no time in announcing their debut full-length album, Triple Seven. Again released via Winspear, the record looks to build on the combination of dream pop, shoegaze and indie rock which we so admired on the EP last year. Lead single ‘Love On The Outside’ plays these various stylistic influences off against one another, granting the track equal doses of heaviness and anthemic release. Such a duality is fitting for a track charting those early days of a relationship, where the tantalising promise of all the possible futures is troubled by an impatience to get to those halcyon days. A song sweet, frustrated and full of the hooks which make Wishy so engaging.

Check out the accompanying video by Rich Smith below:

Triple Seven is out on the 16th August via Winspear and you can pre-order it now.

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A Little Older feels less like an answer than an extended contemplation of the question. A period of time spent sitting with it, exploring its various depths and contours, even as the potential answer changes or begins to feel nothing like an answer at all. “Am I alright or almost there?” asks patient opener ‘Step in Line’. “All that I am, all that I’m not / Am I too bright, or almost there?” This searching tone is indicative of a record in which doubts and convictions intertwine, rising and fading at any given moment. One, as the title suggests, too wise to expect a single epiphany to solve everything. “I’m not hoping for a saviour,” as ‘Forgotten Angle’ puts it. “I’m only sifting through what’s given / An earthly bind or something bitter.”

In this manner, the album should be viewed as a space in which Avina works through this process, rather than the process itself. Songs like the slow dawning ‘I Am Opening’ and reflective ‘Way Things Grow’ clock in at well over seven minutes apiece, long, unhurried tracks which invite the listener to sit still and take part. Free them from the need to do anything else.

This mindful style is present in other ways too. Though possessing an edge and far more succinct, songs like ‘Human’, ‘Poison’ and the title track offer awareness in a different manner. A consciousness of feelings and desires, an acknowledgement of needs and wants. And also a recognition of shortcomings and regrets so that the questioning might continue despite misgivings within any specific time. “How can I learn the way to show / All that matters when I’ve barely grown,” as closer ‘How Can I learn’ puts it. “I’m better than this but I’m battered / Embarrassed by something I missed in the moment.”

A Little Older is out now via Lost Map Records and you can get it from the Alexia Avina Bandcamp page.

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Verheyen asked that the leg be preserved, so that he might keep it in his possession. But soon he found himself plagued by mysterious sensations, phantom pains in a limb no longer present. He began to dissect the leg in search of answers. The process led to the scientific discovery of a number of components, not least the Achilles tendon, but no explanation was found for the mystery sensations. The moment of amputation was clear and final, and surely the leg did not long for its return, but the body from which it had been removed still sensed it near—as though to be alive is to continue to feel, even when the source has gone.

Risking Illness, the forthcoming album from Queens-based songwriter Ian Wayne, confronts an absence of its own. Pivoting away from the tongue-in-cheek sound of debut A Place Where Nothing Matters, the record locates a far more sombre atmosphere, a change that has been attributed to the circumstances under which is arose. Wayne was touring with his band towards the end of 2017 when he received news that a young family member was gravely ill, and when they passed a short time later, the cruel arbitrary nature of the event opened up a void.

Wayne insists that Risking Illness is not an album about that one particular experience, and that any interpretation of the listener should be divorced from this context in any case. “I believe that these songs should be untied from my purpose in writing them,” he writes as explanation. But the story does hold relevance, not in its specificity but rather its shared experience. Just one more manifestation of loss, impossibly personal and life-changing. Elsewhere on the record, other versions emerge—lost relationships, connections never realised—and the lasting impression is not the detail within Wayne’s catalogue of grief, but rather the simple fact that he too has such a catalogue. Just like ours, yet as intimate as a fingerprint.

The effect is achieved not only in the writing but the recording process itself. With Keith Nelson (keyboards), Andrew Stocker (bass) and Dan Knishkowy (drums), Risking Illness was tracked live. The resulting songs are charged not only with an immediacy but a sense of captured transience. Each a fleeting thing that came together at a certain place and time, captured as it arrived, preserved before it could leave again. Visitations that stepped out one by one then commingled, much like grief itself. The beauty and sadness of such things lies not in their purpose or meaning, but the very fact that they appeared at all. These visitations, from somewhere beyond our world or some folded dimension within it, coalescing into an enduring whole.

Today, we have the pleasure of sharing ‘Winter’s’, the final single from the record and the one from which it derives its title. Perhaps the most overt confrontation with the personal tragedy of 2017, the song finds Wayne reflecting on the strangeness of loss. How it is so big and so small, changing everything while the world remains the same. So sudden and so nebulous, the amputation and the phantom pain. And how death is so tightly bound with its opposite, so reliant on the continued motion of life. “How does what does not exist cause me pain?” Tokarczuk has Verheyen ask of his amputated leg. Is it a sign of something deeper or higher than us, some mystery beyond our comprehension? Can such fundamental components of ourselves ever truly be lost? “Why do I feel this lack, this sense of absence?” Tokarczuk continues:

Are we perhaps condemned to wholeness, and every fragmentation, every quartering, will only be a pretence, will happen on the surface, underneath which, however, the plan remains intact, unalterable? Does even the smallest fragment still belong to the whole? If the world, like a great glass orb, falls and shatters into a million pieces—does something great, powerful and infinite remain a whole in this?

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To be co-released by Audio Antihero and Tape Wormies, the fledgling imprint created by Bateman himself (“a hippie commune label, seeking to make its artists co-owners/profit sharers so that everyone will help each other succeed”), forthcoming album Count Bateman represents a shift in the Frog landscape. With drummer/vocalist White moving to London, Bateman found himself without a job, a drummer and the security of a tried and tested recording process. The change, however jarring, did nothing to halt the Frog train, Bateman taking it upon himself to learn new instruments and to work alone, using the opportunity to push his sound outside of the previous borders into something sunnier, more Californian.

Bateman bought a 1979 MX5050 tape machine from one of The Antlers, transforming the practicalities of the recording process further. “Making a record on analog tape is completely different,” Bateman explains. “What you play into the machine is way different than what comes back out, which is both terrifying and really fun.” Upon reading an interview where Elliott Smith mentioned the woman who recorded S/T, Bateman reached out to the person to find out exactly what was used, trying to recreate the set-up. “It obviously sounds way worse and much different, but only because he’s a genius and a monster. I basically only have a willingness to sound like an idiot, but I think it came out pretty well.”

However, no matter how different the record might sound, this is still assuredly Frog. Different gear, a member down, no longer confined to Queens and still the spirit remains, that boundless energy determined to orbit closer and closer to whatever it means to be an American. That Frog is constantly changing, borrowing different influences and styles and geographic inspiration, only strengthens such a quest, living as we are through a time of nebulous identity, where ‘American’ means everything and nothing. “I really would’ve liked there to be someone else to bounce ideas off of while making this, but it was pretty interesting to wear all the hats,” Bateman says. “I’d say making records alone is a little lonely, and you have to play the part of different people to keep it interesting. Sometimes you have to be Fred Astaire, sometimes you have to be Fred Flintstone. Sometimes Rihanna, other times Rachmaninoff. Hopefully at the end it sounds like you.”

Today, we’re lucky enough to be sharing a brand new single a few weeks before the album is released. ‘It’s Something I Do’ is a love song told from the aftermath, an admission of continued longing from amid the wreckage of things. “That’s right, it’s broken and you can’t get back together,” Bateman sings, but the understanding does nothing to change the situation. “That’s right I’m fucked up and it can’t get any better / There’s something in the rough cuts and it makes you can’t forget her.” For all experience and evidence to the contrary, the dream persists. “I’m thinking of you, it’s something I do.”

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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.

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 

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With its lazy drum beat emerging through lonely ambience, ‘Do You Have Anything to Add?’ opens restrained and casual, though a certain energy glows like the embers of a forgotten fire. By the first chorus, this flickers into something more conspicuous, with Blaichman’s vocals joined by those of Ella Rae Peck to possess more assertion and bite. Hints of a more playful side appear across the second verse, conjuring the likes of Nap Eyes, though the track never shakes its leisurely aesthetic, as though a blanket has been thrown over it, masking the true emotions within.

I was dreaming when I wrote this
That’s no excuse
And I don’t want to play remember when
Cos’ sometimes the facts just obscure the truth
Especially when the truth is so bad

Do you have anything to add?
Make our music dreamy and sad.

Raising the tempo, ‘Hungry Ghosts’ is the more upbeat of the two, though there is still an atmospheric stillness in the spaces between the notes. The song almost has something of a western feel, indie rock dragged through some dusty frontier town in search of water, hallucinating a spectral presence while the mind still burns with something, or someone, left far behind.

Do You Have Anything To Add?/Hungry Ghost is out now via BB Island and Soul Step Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

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‘Catchyalater’ is one of my favourite songs from the album, the perfect blend of wit, emotion and pop culture references. As we wrote in our review:

“With ambient sound clips and gentle, emotive vocals, ‘Catchyalater’ brings to mind The Antlers in their In The Attic of The Universe stage… contain[ing] some irresistibly quotable lines”

To give you an idea, the quotable lines include nods to Alanis Morissette and Patrick Ewing, punks and cokes and flicks at the mall, essentially forming (as is most of the album) an ode to America and the past more generally. The remixes are great too, as you might expect. Jack Hayter slows down the pace but dials up the tortured emotion, while Benjamin Shaw leans on the ambient recordings and serves up a slice of soothing introspection. New track ‘God’s Tinnitus’ feels wrapped up and insular, the receding lulls almost more conspicuous than the clanging piano that punctuates it, the whispered vocals hushed and hurried in equal measure, “Sometimes I think that the crickets are just God’s tinnitus”.

‘Catchyalater’ is out on the 22nd of January on Audio Antihero, but you can listen to the whole release below:

The single release just so happens to coincide with Frog’s imminent tour of the UK (dates/poster below). If seeing the duo live wasn’t excitement enough, the transatlantic trip is serving a second purpose – the creation of the fan-funded blockbuster, Frog: Across the Pond. Yep, the boys have enlisted (or maybe were enlisted by) filmmaker Alex Coppola to make a film about their UK adventure. Described as part concert video, part road movie, this project has all the makings of something special. Put it this way, there’ll be a lot more Oscar-boycotting in 2017 if this isn’t nominated. I mean, check out the tagline:

When two friends discover that their little band is big overseas, they decide to try their luck on the other side of the Atlantic.

If you (unlike us, boo!) can get to a show, check out the dates below and try and immortalise yourself on the silver screen:

Jan 23rd – The Waiting Room, Colchester (with Roy / Sophie Nash / Chris Fox)
Jan 24th – Servant Jazz Quarters, London (with Alex Chilltown / Owl & Mouse)
Jan 25th – Fulford Arms, York (with The Drink)
Jan 27th – The Hug & Pint, Glasgow
Jan 29th – Venue TBA, Edinburgh (with Plastic Animals)
Jan 30th – DIY Space for London, London (with Rainmaker / The Johns / Brunch / Crows An Wra)

The post Song Premiere(s): Frog – Catchyalater Single (w/ God’s Tinnitus + Remixes) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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.

‘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 dads

God bless the state of Texas
and the Dallas Cowboys’ blue
I know darling he’ll protect us

Can 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”

‘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. 

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