Frog Eyes: "A Flower in a Glove"

I appreciate my own familiarity with bullshit enough to feel bad about suggesting this, but perhaps it is a simple calculus for Frog Eyes: in the moments when Carey Mercer feels completely honest, his band sounds kind of ordinary. In the moments when Carey Mercer feels esoteric on purpose—when he fronts mythological, shoots from the dick, soft-shoes himself off a ledge toward abstraction—his band sounds kind of astonishingly good. Kids: earmuffs! There is no lesson here.

“Bushels,” off 2007’s Tears of the Valedictorian, is an obvious touchstone for this latter pose. Frog Eyes’ best moment to date, it’s a song compounded with the blueprint of a band aiming high: an applicable, listenable stroke of genius on everything from the relationship between fathers and sons to whether London is that dreary all of the time to whether guitars equal machismo anymore. It is music stuffed with ideas to the absolute brim, and a reminder of how dumb the word “pretentious” can be when it wants. It’s how “All My Friends” might sound if New York actually was the whole universe. Also, yeah, it’s nine minutes long.

While “A Flower in a Glove” is perhaps not quite a sequel to “Bushels,” it certainly comes off as its spiritual kin. Another nine-minute epic, it feels similarly defined by the language of ebb-and-flow. The song’s first minute-plus rides a descendant vocal melody onto a backdrop of (what my caps-lock likes to call) A LOT OF GUITAR. “I shall weep for love, I shall weep for love / You will always need a saint, a flower in a glove,” Mercer shouts, sings, fucks an irony, makes earnest to the max. And yet by the end of the verse things are almost a cappella. “A night made for the raising of your glass,” he announces, and like the best toasts Mercer’s is both brilliant and strange.

Soft / Hard / Repeat scarcely does “A Flower in a Glove” justice: one never feels manipulated by these shifts; its calmer moments are no less the punch-line than its fiercest. In a way, Mercer’s control over his band’s chaos simply becomes part of the narrative. “Did you ever think of a bad idea? / Oh man, no no no no no no no no,” he insists, an irony finally seeping through. And then it hits you: nine minutes is a lot of minutes. For the sake of authority, one claims what one must.

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