>>PREVIEW
FROG EYES
Saturday, June 2
Marquee Room (Uptown Screen)
They say that behind every great album cover there lies a great background story. This couldn’t be any truer than in the case of the fourth full-length effort from Victoria’s Frog Eyes, Tears of the Valedictorian. Known for his impassioned rants, lead singer-songwriter Carey Mercer paints his psychic graffiti across a psychedelic landscape furnished by bandmates Grayson Walker, Ryan Beattie and Melanie Campbell. Blending their post-punk beats with Mercer’s street corner slam poetry, Frog Eyes leaps from genre to genre, style to style at a dizzying pace that is guaranteed to dry your mouth and moisten your eyes.
On the verge of leaping into a North American tour, Mercer takes a moment from his hectic schedule to illuminate the processes behind Frog Eyes’s evolution and the creative breakthrough the band’s new album represents.
"I was thinking about my best friend back in high school," Mercer recalls. "He was the valedictorian the year we graduated and I was remembering how he broke down at the podium during his address. At first I kind of laughed about what a cornball thing that was to do, but then I was really struck by the utter poignancy and sincerity of the whole act. I realized that it had serious relation to what I do and my mind wandered to the way in which we veil our speeches in rigid pomp and ceremony even though it’s ultimately meaningless. Who gives a shit what some precious, celebrated student has to say? Can’t the same be said of any rock star? Everything’s so codified when you walk into a rock club, you already know what you’re going to get. But sometimes tears suggest the possibility of transgressing "the code."
With transgressions numbering in the hundreds it was difficult for Mercer and company to narrow down their palette of colours to best illustrate their new-found confidence in presenting their innermost thoughts and emotions in a theatrical setting. Fortunately, their avant-garde approach to their craft is based largely on intuition and mutual understanding. Lacking any formal musical training, Mercer and Campbell (drums) adapted their own methods of communicating their artistic intentions even as they taught themselves to play their instruments. This level of intellectual interplay ignited sparks in and out of the studio. Soon after Frog Eyes formed, the two extended their friendship into marriage.
"I don’t think we could be more informal about the way we do things," Mercer confesses. "We started out using onomatopoeia to lay down the drums and we quickly came to understand each other. Learning music is like learning to speak a new language – we made up our own remedial caveman language. Our music has no objective foundation, so we’ve never had something to represent staccato, for example, which was frustrating at times. How can I put this into words? Melanie’s always my wife... but sometimes she’s ‘the drummer,’ if you know what I mean."
Mercer readily admits that in the past he has consciously or unconsciously thrown up a smokescreen of sorts between himself and his audience. The band’s previous recordings, The Bloody Hand, Golden River, Folded Palm and Ego Scriptor, have served the dual purpose of raising their critics’ eyebrows and expectations. DJs and audiences have also warmed to the amphibious quartet’s uniquely unsettling brand of West Coast rock. Best described as an artsy cabaret that’s as manic as it is beautiful, Frog Eyes’s live stage show consistently pushes the envelope – challenging audiences to give over to a communal vision.
"I was not totally comfortable with being a rock musician. I mean Sting and Bono are my compatriots in this occupation – it’s the worst!" Mercer confides with a laugh. "In the past I’ve been deeply embarrassed about exposing myself on such a scale – then something clicked over the winter and it brought me back to the early days of making music. I felt like what we were doing was pure again and I felt oddly ready to deal with things. I always question why I’m doing something and I asked myself why I was doing it and what my role was in this formalized ritual.
"Maybe I had to throw myself into extreme doubt. It’s so wonderful to forget one’s insecurities and to be up there free of the day-to-day doldrums. I’m finally free of being critical of my own work instead of feeling like a creep or a fraud. I know it sounds silly to say I want the audience to lose themselves in the performance, but I don’t want to explain the music away. That only robs it of its mystery. And mystery is essential to music." |
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