Frog Eyes looks to hop on board indie scene
By Blaise Hammer
May 3, 2007 9:28 p.m.
If you follow indie rock, you probably know Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade and Dan Bejar of Destroyer. And if you know these two, then you’ve heard of their supergroup, Swan Lake, and the album “Beast Moans,” released last year. But what about the third musician appearing on that album? You know, the one with that really strange voice?
“I remember one tour that we played I got some throat spray and everyone was constantly begging me for throat spray,” Carey Mercer, front man of Frog Eyes and final Swan Lake member, said.
“I’ve heard you are not supposed to eat nuts, bananas or chocolate … so I don’t. Yeah, I’m a little superstitious.”
Mercer certainly has reason to be a little overprotective of his voice. With constantly alternating vocal inflections and almost operatic deviations in his songs, Mercer definitely knows how to wield his voice as its own instrument.
Audiences will be able to see this for themselves when Frog Eyes performs at Spaceland in Silver Lake this Saturday.
To some, Mercer may seem like the third wheel on Krug and Bejar’s date. Yet in reality, he is like the spiked punch at a dance that made these two bigger names relinquish their inhibitions and mingle musically.
And while, in the words of Pitchfork Media, Frog Eyes has historically “been more name-checked than listened to,” this may soon change with the release of the group’s latest album, “Tears of the Valedictorian.”
Frog Eyes, a British Columbian foursome, has been on the periphery of the indie scene with three other major LPs, released by Absolutely Kosher Records. With “Tears of the Valedictorian” just released this week, Frog Eyes should not be cast into the shadow of its contemporaries. And while listeners may have preconceived notions of what to expect from a Canadian indie rock band in the wake of Wolf Parade and Destroyer, Mercer thinks otherwise.
“I have no interest in being understood as a Canadian artist. It just has very little to do with what I do,” Mercer said.
And what Mercer does is sing ““ hard. This mood-motivated, intellectual musician doesn’t self-identify with much, but when Mercer speaks of his music and his perspectives on the world, one begins to think one has signed up for a philosophy class.
With a theory on how the 20th century was a black hole that has sucked everything up and an almost misanthropic perspective on people who “seem to be dark neurotic animals in (their) hearts”, Mercer applies these ideas toward creating coherent noise. But for Mercer, this talk is not just blather, it’s what he wants the music to reflect.
“So that’s why, that maybe there isn’t a lot of harmony in our music. But I think there is a little bit or hints of it,” Mercer said.
When Mercer set out to do “Beast Moans,” he was only halfway finished recording “Tears of the Valedictorian,” but this obligation did not stop him from collaborating with his friends.
Once finished with the Swan Lake LP, however, Mercer reevaluated his group’s own album and decided to reorganize the record’s sound by building off of the strengths and weaknesses of Swan Lake.
“The first half of the record was done before Swan Lake, and there was a little bit more joy and moving around,” Mercer said. “And then after Swan Lake I was so just disgusted by the idea of moving around, and so appreciative of actually having songs before you went in the studio.”
This revamped sound is clearly manifested with “Bushels,” a nine-minute-plus song that employs transitions that captivate with every shift and instrumentation that actually all starts in the beginning and ends in the end.
But to listen to a Frog Eyes album and see them in concert are two markedly different things. One should not be surprised by similarities or dissimilarities between Frog Eyes live and on the record.
“Live has absolutely nothing to do with the CD. It’s just about our approach,” Mercer said. “If a song ends up sounding close to what happened on the CD, it’s kind of just by accident. It’s not like we are willfully trying to change it.”
Yet while the band isn’t necessarily trying to reproduce any specific sound, Mercer and Frog Eyes are making a concerted effort to continue doing what they do best.
“We speak a very narrow language, but we are trying to speak it quite well,” he said.
