When the poet Walt Whitman bragged about sounding his "barbaric yawp," he probably didn't anticipate all the sounds that wrench forth from vocalist-guitarist Carey Mercer's throat over the course of a single Frog Eyes song. To try and describe the British Columbia band's music is to risk drowning in a figurative-language toybox—one Allmusic review called it "a poetry slam for the criminally insane"—or at least to fixate helplessly on Mercer's vocals. Songs like "Bushels," the 9-minute home stretch of 2007's Tears Of The Valedictorian, seem to really live for the stage, where they become sweaty, partly improvised showcases for Mercer's toolbox of abrasive wails, jabbering falsetto, and almost-stately melodic charges. The band's new album, Paul's Tomb: A Triumph, casts Frog Eyes as a road-battered rock outfit, though admittedly one with a penchant for long, ungainly song structures and verbal madness. Ahead of Frog Eyes' show tonight at the 7th Street Entry, The A.V. Club asked Mercer (whose voice becomes incredibly mild and reasonable when he's just talking) about his vocal performances on a few specific songs, and found him almost keen to downplay the eccentricity of it all.
"Lear In Love" (from Paul's Tomb)
The A.V. Club: When people think of King Lear, they think of this guy going crazy, running through the forest and raving, but this song has a lot of tender parts, too.
Carey Mercer: That's right. Well, Lear is tender at times. There's no evil men. There's just moments of clarity and moments when you're lost in the fury of things. That's one of the things that's always at work when I'm singing—just acknowledging the dualism in all of us, that kind of thing. The other thing is, I like to throw clichés in. I think when a cliché comes after something so odd as, you know, this idea that a bear hunter has gone out and enraged a bear and the wife is terrified that the claws will tear through her home, and that kind of thing—what's scarier, the bear, or the bear hunter returning? An image like that is very specific to that song. You're not gonna hear that image in a Celine Dion song. But the clichés that come after—she's all right, it's all right, baby, it's all right, that kind of thing—you will hear that in a Celine Dion song. To say to your lover, "It's all right," is actually the most intense and real thing you could say to this person. I think very specific images and often very tense, perilous images can somehow [redeem the cliché].
"Styled By Dr. Roberts" (from Paul's Tomb)
AVC: This feels like a centerpiece of the album, almost. Around the middle of the song, you have this mix of whispering, rambling, and going, "Oh no no no no no." Are you planning out how all those different parts are delivered?
CM: I have really concrete parts and very loose parts. That's a very loose part. This is after the guitar solo, and there's some stuff about a dwarf? Is this the part we're talking about?
AVC: Yeah.
CM: Okay, because that's kind of a loose part. There's key words—you always get the dwarf—but then there's a lot of flexibility in where the lines go and how they're uttered, and the cadence of them. It's actually really nice and really refreshing to sing it in a different way each time. When things are really fast and really tight, you don't have that flexibility. One of the worst things in making a record is actually doing the singing, going into this booth after you've assembled everything and putting headphones on. It's so terrible, because, for Frog Eyes, the whole idea of it is—it's kind of embarrassing to say—a very intense performance. When you put the headphones on in the studio, you're mimicking what you're doing live. The nice thing is, most of these songs [on Paul's Tomb] were sung off the floor, which just means you just keep the vocal track that you sung when the whole band was recording the song. We got as many tries as we wanted, but I think it really worked well in giving that sense of spontaneity and a kind of freedom to the singing, because it actually is happening in real time.
"Bushels" (from Tears Of The Valedictorian)
AVC: Sometimes when you're singing, you have this catch or squeak in your voice. It's not a note, but just this weird breath thing.