Frog Eyes at The Frequency
Frog Eyes had barely trudged through its set opener, “Odetta’s War” Friday night at The Frequency before some concertgoer was nudging The A.V. Club and shouting, “This is such a Wolf Parade knock-off!”
Look dude, let’s set aside the fact that Frog Eyes started in 2002—a year before Wolf Parade—or that Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug was once in Frog Eyes. What really sets Frog Eyes apart from its contemporaries is the way each member carries his or her own idiosyncrasies across while working together. Take “Lear In Love” for example—vocalist-guitarist Carey Mercer’s manic warbling and sandpaper guitar tone collided over guitarist Ryan Beattie’s jangled riffs and drummer Melanie Campbell’s primal thumping. All the while, synth player Megan Boddy hammered out all the basslines, peppering the tune with a sort of kraut-rock nerdiness. The band’s killer performance of “Lear In Love” also embodied Mercer’s tendency to write tunes with massive tempo shifts and whiplash dynamics, breaking down from a howling burst into broken balladry at the drop of a Prozac bottle. “I kissed a girl / She was the only one who seemed to own a shard of light / She’s all right,” Mercer wailed, in a way that would fill Gary Wilson with concern.
“It’s a sincere fucking pleasure to be here playing music,” Mercer told the modest crowd. The frontman didn’t seem too big on stage banter, so one annoying fan took it upon herself to fill in the ellipses between songs by shouting, “You can do it” like Rob Schneider in The Waterboy. “That’s fucking weird,” Mercer responded. “I mean, I like encouragement, but actually—I don’t know if I really do.”
The band ripped through several tunes from this year’s Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph, including a rippling rendition of “The Sensitive Girls,” with all of its wobbly guitar lines not-so-firmly intact. Mercer even pulled out called “Biloxi, In A Grove, Cleans Out His Eyes” by Blackout Beach, one of his other projects. Of course, any fans who came out to hear their favorite old Frog Eyes tunes were likely bummed out, as the only tune played that wasn’t on Paul’s Tomb was “A Latex Ice Age” from 2003’s The Golden River.
“Okay, so now we’re going to pretend that we have already walked offstage and came back on,” Mercer joked, before leading his band through massive nine-minute-plus set-closer “A Flower In A Glove.” The sweaty quartet then took its bows and left for real.
