Photo by Andrew Piccone.
There’s something vaguely familiar about the Frog EP, I’ve a feeling maybe I did actually catch it the first time round (which granted was only a couple of years ago) but now seems the right time for a re-issue as the art world seems to be continuously flooded with musical duos at the moment and who better to check out than New York’s two-piece offering in Frog.
Made up of Dan Bateman on vocals and guitar along with Tom White on drums, synths and additional vocals the pairing also add keyboards, glockenspiels and even the odd police siren thrown in for good measure to create an album full of psychedelic guitar pop.
Although the time seems right for Frog to become popular in the underground indie hipster world, the first couple of tracks see comparisons to the acid fuelled days of early Flaming Lips, whilst ‘Jesus Song’ has a more stripped back garage rock of the 60’s.
The slow build-up on ‘Nancy Kerrigan’ is also just as intriguing as the songs lyrical content, focussing on the trial and tribulations of the figure skater to whom the song title takes its name.
Nancy Kerrigan having become more famous for the horrific attack at the hands of a rival’s ex-husband than that of her Olympic medals provided the subject matter for the first song Frog wrote together and since then the pair seem to have covered an array of topics, from nervous breakdowns to the 1800’s literacy of Washington Irving.
The mini-album has traits of shoegaze throughout, especially on the more trippy “Space Jam” and although the EP closes with the lo-fi “Nowhere band” we can forgive Frog for including a throwaway song as it’s the penultimate tune in ‘Rubbernecking‘ that truly brings things to an end, so skipping the last track and Frog have provided us with a re-issue of beautifully crafted tunes that whilst sounding modern and fresh could easily have been a release from years gone by.
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