Frog Eyes

The Glow is finishing without a consensus on a fucking Frog Eyes album? My junior perspective is that the staff owes Carey Mercer at least some of our lives, whether he saved or shaped or just put them into motion. Though, as far as celebrating a man of splintering consequences and time-flows and waterfalls and interruptions, it also seems fitting that we wouldn’t all be saying goodbye the same way.

You might recall we collectively had a thing for Carey’s Cold Spring, our favorite album of 2013, a hopelessly hopeful album. Or was it hopefully hopeless? Did we fall for its romanticism, for the motivational poster sprayed with “don’t give up your dreams,” or was it about time he completely obliterated us with the hurt of “don’t ever try to live out your dreams”? Whatever we were feeling in opposition to each other, it was together we felt it. If we were listening to him run in place on “Duration of Starts and Lines”—hearing him breathe the ticks and tocks of the clock, willing it to walk across the wall it was stuck to—or if we were watching him set fire to the trail behind every discarded note of “Your Holiday Treat” so he could never go anywhere but forward, or if we were with him balladeering through “Noni’s Got A Taste For The Bright Red Air Jordans” in some disfigured, unwound slow jam—I suppose we were reacting to Frog Eyes with contradictions, arguing in unison about how best to love it, believing that movement and stillness were just two sides of a waiting coin.

With Pickpocket’s Locket, things are different. Some of us like it and some of us don’t, some are indifferent and some undecided, while I think I might be the only one among us who ranks it somewhere close to perfect. Right now, I’m just asking you not to reject it on spec, even though an acoustic Frog Eyes album is a scornful combination by any metric that compares it to the pantomimic noise rock of The Folded Palm (2004) or the Bowie-meets-Walker-meets-Ono-meets-This Heat-meets-Richard Young’s scuzz punk of Tears of the Valedictorian (2007). The last time Mercer played an acoustic guitar this performatively he was doing so on Ego Scriptor (2004), a record of second takes that perhaps existed to explain the rites of the Frog Eyes sound: repulsive, messy, and discordant, often falling off a ledge but never fading. Mercer picks one up now in tribute to his late father, taking his hand-me-down acoustic and sketching out songs later filled out (complicated to fuck and disproportionate from any hope of humility) by Melanie Campbell’s cloud-clear drumming, Spencer Krug’s gorgeous string arrangements, and the odd, cheeky keyboard motif. So fuck it off, if you want, because it’s hard to listen to this band start making sense. I just want you to know that this is what every Frog Eyes album has ever been: chaos wrapped up safe and tight.

On Carey’s Cold Spring, Mercer seemed drawn to the prospect of evil, as if it had living qualities or even a body—it had “no plan,” but tellingly, he spoke to it in the second person. He alternated between shivering guitar tones and beaming melodies for communal listening; he sorta suggested there were sides to be taken, while also refusing to write a record about anything in particular. The more time I’ve spent enamored with these two records, the more Pickpocket’s Locket feels like Carey’s Cold Spring’s twin: in 2013, the path narrowed towards hate, but in 2015 Mercer’s writing tributes and love songs and even rallying cries—though the demons and borders remain. You know this is supposed to be his quiet record, right?

I once read a last.fm comment that compared Mercer to Meat Loaf, by the way. Best review I ever read. I shan’t belittle “Crystal Blip” as long as I live, but I’ll sure as hell compare it to “I’d Do Anything For Love.” Mercer goes way too far into its verses, rivaling ML with an endless “wait for it” pre-chorus, built to last with a dropdown menu of metaphors. I can’t get enough: I want him to rattle off a hundred more unrelated images. I want him to throw away some the way he always does, and then also stumble in on a whole tree of detail borne from an odd couplet. (“You’re a notch on the sword, you’re a nail on the board, you should never’ve been born, not with all those plans to abort.”) But like a really good Meat Loaf song, I also want to hear the chorus, which Mercer dots with his ferocious, repetitive signature: “When you run run run run run,” he splutters, until the words stand for nothing that resemble verbs, slurring into something else. “Because you’re wrong.”

Having “run” turn into “wrong” is just a little nudge at the multitudes that fill up Mercer’s music. Corey once talked to me about how good pop music sounds to him when it’s grotesque, and Frog Eyes albums are that: malady leeching into melody. It’s because of this that old songs like “Bushels” rattle over, past the point of coherence until they’re free form, and why new ones like “Rip Down The Fences” are afraid of resting on a cadence, instead reaching into an excessively proggy finale. Because prog is where more lives, right? It’s why the twisting keys and swells of “I Ain’t Around Much” sound internally devastating. This isn’t gut-wrenching music, but music having its gut wrenched.

Through every one of his records, Mercer has inspired me to queasiness, instilling visions of a nightmare where I need to move more than anything but can do nothing but stay the same. Exalted resignations like “It’s a rich man’s world / And I’m a poor, poor man!” are traps dying for trapdoors to let victims in; every glorious success is matched with a Machiavellian attempt on its life. If Pickpocket’s Locket shows me anything true and perfect and traditional about what Frog Eyes means—and it’s something I could say about the tones Mercer’s guitar shakes with; the way one of those drum fills blushes; the snakily convoluted stories; or even that voice, the only voice in Music you can genuinely call a yelp—it’s just some “eye of the beholder” shit. And the Glow’s is a special beholder: one who must say goodbye, though most of us don’t have any idea how.