by Christopher J. Lee
Mister Goblin is the second project led by Sam Goblin – a pseudonym I will stick to for reasons of privacy – following Two Inch Astronaut, who released five albums from 2012’s Red Pancake and the Dark Energy to 2017’s Can You Please Not Help. Two Inch Astronaut specialized in a power pop style reminiscent of bands like (a cleaned up) Superchunk and the Apples in Stereo, though with greater compositional range than either of those bands. Like Jonathan Richman, Robert Pollard, or Will Sheff, Goblin appears to be an inexhaustibly resourceful songwriter, finding absorbing hooks with seemingly little effort. He can go hard when he wants but can equally pull back and slow things down when the song demands it. Albums like Foulbrood from 2014 and Personal Life from 2016 brandish this unforced ability to go both ways, perpetually finding new strategies around a chord progression or a verse-chorus-verse structure that avoid prosaism.
Mister Goblin shares these features with Two Inch Astronaut, though this project also comes across as more refined about what Goblin wants his sound to be. His first release under this moniker, Final Boy, had the markers of a stripped-down solo offering with tracks like “Be Right There” recalling the songcraft of Mac McCaughan’s Portastatic. Taking this new turn further, its follow-up, Is Path Warm?, was an even quieter affair with some acoustic numbers (“Health Class Teacher” and “Between You and Me”) and more restrained electric guitar work (“Fix Your Face”). Ever prolific, he has released three more albums since then, including 2021’s Four People in an Elevator and One of Them is the Devil, 2022’s Bunny, and now Frog Poems.
The promotional material for Frog Poems cites the Lemonheads as an influence, and this reference is a lightbulb moment. Not only does Goblin have amiable vocals like Evan Dando or John Strohm of Blake Babies – listen to “Girl in a Box” off of Sunburn for comparison – but, more clearly than Two Inch Astronaut, Mister Goblin belongs to a genealogy going back to these bands and less remembered ones like Dumptruck and Big Dipper, New Sincerity acts like the Reivers, southern college rock outfits like Let’s Active and the dBs, and, even earlier, the Modern Lovers and Big Star. Drawing out this lineage may seem excessive, but Mister Goblin is furtively continuing a pop tradition that is arguably less prominent than it once was.
The title Frog Poems announces a perspective approaching a New Sincerity orientation, and the songs that follow carry that spirit without slipping into mawkishness. The album kicks off with “Goodnight Sun,” a reimagining of Margaret Wise Brown’s classic children’s book, Goodnight Moon, which musically has that early to mid-1990s Boston sound. As if to quickly defuse any taint of uncritical sentimentality, part of this reimagining includes getting stoned and going to Applebee’s and Olive Garden. The second track, “Grown Man,” ventures further into adulthood to enumerate the difficulties of that life stage, including the hangovers of childhood and the inability to take care of oneself. “The Notary,” which is among the best on this LP, considers career options as a sensitive young person might (“I want to be a notary/so somebody somewhere will always need me”). From a musical standpoint, these themes work well with Goblin’s use of falsettos, male/female harmonies, and the dynamic juxtapositions of his guitar sound from soft to abrasive. The music pulls you in immediately, taking you in different directions that can be both reassuring and uneasy.
Frog Poems unfolds in this way, tracking the incomplete negotiations between childhood and adulthood that linger over time. Goblin seems to be asking, are there ways of revisiting the former without becoming entrapped by nostalgia? Neither life stage entirely subsumes the other with recollections of acquaintances (“Mike Shinoda”), ambition (“Run, Hide, Fight”), and crushes (“Fit to Be Tied” with backing vocals by Sadie Dupuis) complicating any straightforward progression of life or time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the album ends with images of mortality (“Death by worms/or death by a thousand cigarette burns”) on the title track, though the perspective offered is hardly bleak, being tempered by the availability of some form of love.
Neither kitsch nor hard-hearted, it would be easy to say that Frog Poems is about confronting the loss of innocence. It is clear, however, that Mister Goblin is concerned with going beyond this worn-out premise to examine the deeper, unresolved ambiguities of growing up as the source material for both adult confusion and contentment. This point of view isn’t entirely a rehash of the notion of the child being the parent to the adult; it is more along the lines of innocence and experience co-existing at once. Yet, there is also a lightness of touch to this album. Like his musical forebears mentioned earlier, Mister Goblin is committed to recording a certain set (or period) of feelings rather than tallying rites of passage or arriving at the settled conclusions of maturity. Through elements of pop grace, Frog Poems is a reminder that we ignore the emotional insights of those long-ago episodes, however distant, at our peril.