With 232 pages and an expanded 12″ by 12″ format, our biggest print issue yet celebrates the people, places, music, and art of our hometown, including cover features on David Lynch, Nipsey Hussle, Syd, and Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, plus Brian Wilson, Cuco, Ty Segall, Lord Huron, Remi Wolf, The Doors, the art of RISK, Taz, Estevan Oriol, Kii Arens, and Edward Colver, and so much more.
Steps for painting frog eyes
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Tree Frog Eyes Oil Painting
ContentsThis Virginia Tree Frog is the fourth painting in my Eyes of the Wild series.
It is a is 16″ x 20″ in oils on a gallery wrapped canvas. I used gold leaf in the eyes to create the sparkle. Perfect for any frog collector.The Golden River
Absolutely Kosher presents greatly expanded versions of two albums from Carey Mercer’s criminally underrated indie rock band.
An opening phrase like “silver gnomes all in my dome” could signify the start of a game of D&D; or a record of progressive rock– or, well, maybe Carey Mercer clearing his syrupy throat. Frog Eyes shouldn’t be accused of front-loading their releases, but even without conjuring gnomes and cups filled with blood, their openers shine extravagantly bright. The Bloody Hand‘s “Sound Travels From the Snow to the Dark” alchemically transforms David Bowie’s “Spaceman” into an earthy power ballad, and The Golden River is jumpstarted by “One in Six Children Will Flee in Boats”, an acoustic-to-baroque dustpan anthem.
Since The Bloody Hand, Frog Eye’s 2002 debut, Mercer’s brainy Ziggy Stardust-meets-Where the Wild Things Are sound has proven maddeningly inspired. Mercer attacks each syllable in his gothic libretto with such gusto that even if he wasn’t saying anything interesting his exuberance would still be enough to draw a crowd. Lucky for those of us who dig language, he doesn’t half-step; in fact, unpacking his dark, fantastical scenery and swamp-stomp poetry requires close reading and, perhaps, a working knowledge of Latin.
I’m not saying anything new: Mercer, along with drummer Melanie Campbell, bassist Mike Rak, and keyboardist Grayson Walker, have been an established force for a few years, gaining a wider audience with 2004’s less magical The Folded Palm. Still, you get the feeling that for many, the Victoria, B.C. quartet remains no more than a name dropped by Wolf Parade when its members are asked to list their favorite contemporary musicians. As Daniel Johnston or the Vaselines know, a ringing endorsement from a younger, more popular artist can draw new listeners, which is just one of a dozen or so reasons why it’s nice to have these early, hard to find but absolutely essential albums reissued by Absolutely Kosher. And man, did they ever bring them back with triple-fat style.
If you consider yourself a longtime diehard, keep reading, because there’s more than enough extra material appended to make old friends shine like new. Showing an attention to detail, the label and band decided to place a 30-second pause before the bonus tracks on each album– this way, theory goes, the extras seem self-contained and not like a run-on sentence.
Anyhow, once The Golden River‘s 11 tracks end, 12 additional songs more than double the listening experience. The reinforcements were culled from the “Emboldened Navigator” 7″ (originally out on Brooklyn’s excellent Soft Abuse label) and a wonderfully raw, previously unreleased recording session with Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown’s Spencer Krug on keyboards.
Steely-eyed completists will note that The Bloody Hand‘s “The Fruit That Fell From the Tree” is here as “The Fruit That Ate Itself” in homage to the Modest Mouse oldie. Take a gander at the gruff, pokier version of the aforementioned “One in Six Children Will Flee In Boats” (from The Golden River): Its crackles are lo-fi and pretty until Mercer sharpens his surroundings. “Libertatia’s National Lullaby”, a melancholic distorto/spring-reverb closer, is another repeat. Parsing every minor repetition or hiccup requires a flow chart (mine’s been kept in glittery crayon), so you can do the math on the rest of that.
While reviewing Sunset Rubdown’s LP, I deflected the Krug/Mercer comparisons, but it’s increasingly difficult to let them slide. Not only does The Golden River reinscribe the Krug session, but instrumental track “A Song Once Mine Now No Longer Mine” shows up on Sunset Rubdown’s debut as “Sol’s Song”. Then, more obviously, there’s “Spencer’s Song For Carey to Officially Sing” and the new Canadian supergroup Swan Lake, in which the two are joined by Destroyer’s Dan Bejar. Critical difference: Like Krug, Mercer has one of those voices. Unlike Krug, his backup band doesn’t always sweep– it occasionally gargles. The more staid backing band calls for more acrobatics in a singer’s delivery– as a wise Pitchfork staffer put it, Krug acts like a monster, Mercer, in fact, is one. A humane monster, of course, like John Gardner’s Grendel.
The newfangled version of The Bloody Hand is just as jammed. Here, it’s buffered by Seagulls Is on the Rise, the until now unreleased sophomore album from Mercer and bassist Mike Rak’s pre-Frog Eyes band, the Blue Pine. The material feels a bit aimless, less distinguished, and is generally mellower than Frog Eyes. There are compelling moments, though, like the Jarvis Cocker-like crooning on “Buttercup”, the paper-shredding guitar solo on “Tyranny of Sight and Tyranny of Seeing”, and the stuck-in-quicksand and sloshed on whiskey power-sad closer “Before They Was Killed in a Car Crash”, which goes out with some full-on psychedelic, hurricane noise. (Tellingly, a few tracks before it is “Drinking: The Song”).
Whatever the peaks and valleys, these fresh-faced reissues were intended both as a build-up for Frog Eyes’ next full-length as well as a way to bring the original trilogy (as Mercer views it) to a definitive close. They succeed in providing the latter, but according to sources close to the band, album four, Tears of the Valedictorian, has been pushed back until early 2007. Please, though, no worries: Until then, there’s a 19-minute single-song EP forthcoming on the Spanish label Acuarela and, more substantially, these super-stocked reissues.
Mia Joy, Celestial Mirror
This brief but sweet collection seems to use the template of the changing seasons to showcase the Chicago-based songwriter’s ability to create entrancing dream-pop compositions.
Sen Morimoto, Diagnosis
On his third album, the jazz-pop songwriter slows his lush, quirky sonic environment’s roll as he expands his lyrical focus to paint a more complex portrait of his social identity.
New Order, Substance ’87 [2023 Reissue]
This essential document of the new wave band’s arc as they perfected their fusion of melancholy and club music gets a no-strings-attached remaster in its ideal double-LP form.
Frog Eyes
The Bees
PAPER BAGVancouver indie rockers Frog Eyes called it quits after 2018’s Violet Psalms and spent a brief run under the name Soft Plastics. Chalk it up as a short fever dream for a band that always sounded like it spun those like cotton candy. Unlike associated Canadian songwriters like Destroyer’s Dan Bejar or Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner, lead vocalist/guitarist Carey Mercer seems to be just fine with his group’s off-center stature in the music industry. He’s always just a few steps shy of breakout success, but rarely fails to deliver the good stuff. The closest Frog Eyes ever got was 2007’s Tears of the Valedictorian, an epic album released during that short window of time when indie rock was at its most deliriously arcane, a place Frog Eyes knows very well. The project always had plenty of punk veracity, but tempered it by dog-earring art-rock songbooks.
As it was years ago, Mercer’s voice is always the centerpiece of any good Frog Eyes track. It growls, coos, and curls around each manic lyric like a coiled rattlesnake. His inimitable performance on The Bees is even more impressive after surviving a 2013 throat cancer diagnosis. Varying in length, tone, and setting, these 10 tracks sound like a new era for both his singing and his backing trio that pushed him along. The propulsive “Rainbow Stew” opens the record on a high note as the band continues to work toward the crest of the wave before landing on the title track. Lead single “When You Turn on the Light” is a domestic, apartment-living inspired song that finds a 21-year-old Mercer walking into his bedroom in the late afternoon, still a bit high off fresco painting fumes from the night before, and finding the building’s manager staring at the “hellish umber landscape that glittered street light reflections from the enamel paint.”
Mercer is usually writing musical short stories like “Light” and “Here Is a Place to Stop,” which are often a heady mixture of fever dream and weekend drinking spree. Some of the best Frog Eyes albums (The Golden River and The Bloody Hand) manage this dichotomy well, and The Bees gets pretty damn close. Drummer Melanie Campbell and keys player Shyla Seller set the mood on “I Was an Oligarch,” “A Rhyme for the Star,” and “He’s a Lonely Song” as Mercer sloshes the mise en scene back and forth in his mouth like a rich tannic wine.
“Lonely Song” in particular is one of Frog Eyes’ best no-frills rock tracks in almost a decade. Mercer recounts a story of his dad sitting at the edge of his bed reassuring him that God is not dead, but also filling his brain with images of American frontiersmen slaughtering buffalo and piling their corpses up under a sick, pallid sun. This is the thrawn natural world of Frog Eyes, where fathers speak of a species’ sunset and their sons fight against the dying of that light. Enjoy the ride while it lasts—as Mercer sings on The Bees’ final track, “everything dies and everything glows.”
