by Sara Mae (@scary_mae)
New York duo Frog returns with a rowdy cast of characters on a beaming LP, and a new lineup in Daniel Bateman’s brother, Steve. In the introductory track of their album, GROG, a cheery voice explains that grog is the drink of choice for sailors in the 18th century. GROG does have a flushed, rosy feeling to it, a giddiness in the sustained end words of “Ur Still Mine,” a vulnerable falsetto in “Goes w/o Saying” at once intimate and echoing, a hilly, twinkling piano solo closing out the song. The lyrics in GROG sometimes read like two friends trying to make each other laugh. The album telegraphs itself as cheeky– Daniel Bateman’s saccharine singing of the chorus in “420!!” and the rye lyrics of “New Ro” – “Back to the place where we’re from / Where the girls they put out in a car / And the waitresses all got a scar.” That same feeling of driving around the place you grew up comes out in “Gone Back to Stanford,” threading together vignettes of college student characters, an initial folk ballad kind of storytelling and a tense, repetitive riff opening up to strings a minute or two in and creating an over-the-speed-limit kind of build.
“U Shud Go 2 Me” has the folk collage weirdness of Dr. Dog’s Toothbrush and “Maybelline” has the rattling vocals and easy listening hook of a Vundabar song. There’s a quotidian tenderness in “So Twisted Fate,” the lyrics like a LVL UP song, the tone like the reflective train rides in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A harmonica leads us into a thumping chorus, “So twisted fate / Like a plunge in the neckline / Or a change in the set time.”
“Black on Black on Black” is a disco flare on an otherwise denim-y album. It has a loftier storyline – with Greek tragic figures orbiting around the isle of Omphalos felt in lyrics such as “I’m begging you on my knees of sorrow.” Beside the other songs with very grounded, real figures, it seems Frog is bringing the epic stories down to our level – where do we learn how to act out our emotional turmoil? Where does the grandiose and tragic emerge in each of us? Commanding lyrics string through the songs, “You should come and go on my say so” in “Doom Song” and “You’re gonna get me / And then you’re gonna see” on “Black on Black on Black” and “You know you’re mine” on “So Twisted Fate.” It seems like a taunting speaker, and maybe it’s the violins, or the lo-fi production on songs like “Ur Still Mine” or the frog on the cover pointing to the group’s name, but there is an Over the Garden Wall sensibility to the storytelling and the bursting nostalgia. There’s an adventurousness to this record that makes it both surprising and seductive – it’s tough not to sing along to “So Twisted Fate” on repeat, waving your pint around.