Tears of the
Valedictorian is the fourth official full-length album from
theVictoria, BC band Frog Eyes. As Tears takes flight, it’s
clear the album is something wholly other. There is space
on this record, real dynamic development, especially heard
on the two tracks that make up its centerpiece: the twin epics
"Caravan Breakers" and "Bushels," (the latter is Frog Eyes
at its finest hour). Tears follows The Folded Palm, an abrasive
and fragmented work whose dark shards brought an end to an
unnamed trilogy of records (The Bloody Hand, The Golden River
and The Folded Palm). Tears of the Valedictorian is counterpoint
from this abrasiveness, so hot at its center that it seems
immune to decay. Here, the record label speaks of catechism
while the band is speculatively content with, even grateful
for, longevity. On the surface, Carey Mercer's lyrics hold
an extremely bleak world view in every song we find profession
gone wrong: an ambassador blown apart, a cold lieutenant searching
for the remains of his father, a general who has lost his
daughter to the dawn, a peddler who awakes in the most desolate
stretch of night only to fret over his wares. And catastrophe,
so much catastrophe: the planes blow the boats from the isles,
the wheat is failing so therefore has to last, May has been
exiled and Patriarchs are sent off into the Bering sea on
ice chunks. We cannot, however, hear this Voice as that of
the mythical Cassandra, prophesizing doom wholesale lest we
turn back at this most grave moment. Mercer has always been
on about this shit: crops failing, villages falling apart,
things generally falling apart. And hear his line in "Eagle
Energy", both whispered and shouted directly after "The Tempest
within us / is the Tempest without us": "We won't be discarded!"
It is as much a rallying cry, an "UP WITH PEOPLE" as we can
hope to hear, but it is enough to help us through the work,
and hear it more as a confession of our collective neurosis
rather than a holier than thou damnation of a world in distress.
We have always been fucked up. We will always bring the tempest.
So, with Frog Eyes you have the unusual combination of a lyricist
/ front man whose influences are as much early Russian and
Irish literature as, you know, "Cinnamon Girl", "Virginia
Plain" or Thurston's screech, all laced over this incredibly
intuitive and connected music. This is wholly due to the band
Mercer has assembled around him - his wife Melanie Campbell
has developed a drumming style that supplants or at least
challenges that voice as the primary mover and shaker. Michael
Rak's bass playing is steady and precise and it's certain
he's studied the great Peter Hook. Spencer Krug's keyboards
are an unholy marvel, at once the flock of baroque birds chirping,
and at other points the boom and groan of piano earthquake.
Mccloud Zicmuse compliments Mercer's guitar, looping melodic
blips and squiggles over the cyclone thrash. Of course, there’s
the voice, Mercer’s voice, almost channeled, frightening and
maybe a little frightened, defiantly soulful and impossibly
bleak, a hundred thousand years old, a hundred thousand hailstorms,
a hundred thousand old photographs, a hundred thousandth of
a second from epiphany. It shakes, he shakes, you shake. When
you hear all of this swirling around you, you have to ask
yourself if any other band in the world could have made this
record. It is strong and it is soft; ugly and beautiful at
the same time, raw and unadorned and yet indirect, abstract
and almost impenetrable in its labyrinths. Our feeling is,
of course, that Frog Eyes is entirely unique, a blessed aberra-
tion that refuses to fade away, and that Tears of The Valedictorian
might be the jewel in their crown. |