Frog Eyes are the secret ingredient
Rhyming nonsense conjures up good and evil — no one notices
Kendra Ballingall, Staff
Frog Eyes
Collective Cabaret
Sept. 12
Despite voyeuristic officials at the Canada-U.S. border, Frog Eyes arrived in Winnipeg last Monday, though to a sparse and distracted audience. Nearing the end of a three-week tour, the noisy, Victoria-based Indie band breathed a relieved sigh on their way the heck out of Cloverland, Wisconsin, after succumbing to local pressure to join in on a polyamorous wedding party at a local pub. Lewd photographs taken during and after the celebration were inspected at the border crossing.
The small turnout at the Collective Cabaret on Sept. 12 only confirmed the band’s under-appreciated status. Frog Eyes (Melanie Campbell, Michael Rak, Carey Mercer and a new guitarist replacing keyboardist Grayson Walker) are more neglected than underrated: critics who do discover their sublime cacophony are resolutely impressed, but the band is often left in the smoke and confetti of scenester favourites the Arcade Fire and up-and-comers Wolf Parade.
I was first bombarded by the sounds of Frog Eyes in a foundational visual art class. Singer\guitarist Carey Mercer, who creates the cover art for Frog Eyes and has released his own solo album, was a quiet, composed and thoroughly buttoned-up presence throughout the course, until the final performance assignment.
After mock cell-phone conversations and exhibitionist self-grooming, Mercer set up his act, which involved drums, projected photos of tourist attractions in the 1970s and a plastic toy wind-powered keyboard (but don’t be mistaken; this isn’t mere kitsch). He began pounding the foot pedal and tweaking scintillating noises from the keyboard until his performance escalated into a tense scene of frenetic motion and clamour.
By the end, he had abandoned the foot pedal — why not just kick the drum? — and turned magma red as though the core of the earth was trying to expel itself through his collared neck. (Mercer is known to warn his audiences not to be afraid.)
Vocals carry the grand, orchestral sound of Frog Eyes, and the Winnipeg show was no exception. One minute, Mercer seemed to conjure up the dead like an infuriated preacher or Dante’s medium; the next, he sounded like a nursery-rhyme woman on a stool after spotting a mouse in the kitchen. The band’s urgent cadence and crescendos-cut-short complemented Mercer’s chanting incantations and falsetto howls through a short set, which included “The Fence Feels its Post” and “I Like Dot Dot Dot” off their most recent album, The Folded Palm.
Frog Eyes shows may verge on apocalyptic, but some in Monday’s audience remained oblivious. When Mercer’s screams sank into whispers, his subtle lyrics were nearly lost to conversations in the black-lit bar. Few would have heard the last lines of “Akhian Press”: “Welfare is all right . . . welfare is all right, but it’s a burden in the night, hate borders, hate the free, hate the billionaire in me . . . .”
Barely decipherable in a live show anyhow, Mercer’s lyrics are laden with conflicted personae and lofty themes. He travels through eras, picking images from random centuries (though seeming to favour the Middle Ages), and while at times he feigns certainty — “The emperor of time is an enemy of mine” — we never really know which side he’s on, whether lord or serf, boss or worker, master or slave.
Amid mention of mayors, lordships and crowns, Christian images abound — monasteries, the papacy, heretics, shepherds, blessed words, and bread. These songs are mythical duels between faith and reason, good and evil, no less. Yet when the new guitarist subtly announced the last song, a heckler (at least one person in the audience was paying attention) piped up: “You’re not a Christian rock band after all.” Indeed, Frog Eyes grow in the garden of earthly delights.
With influences including Bosch, Chaucer and Pushkin, Mercer’s intellect is so often cited that you’d think he was an essayist and not an indie rocker. He reinforces this with self-conscious lines like “Are you the transcendent signi-signified oh I lied promised not to sing the word signified: but you’ve got science” in “A Library Used to Be (black hole and its concentrated edges).”
But if Mercer hasn’t got science, he has nonsense down to a science, and any Frog Eyes song is more like a splendid, freaked-out nursery rhyme than an essay. Illogical yet deliberate, this is outsider art at its unacknowledged best.
Brains aside, Frog Eyes know how to rock out — and they just might be the missing ingredient in your indie rock soup.
