7. Frog EyesCarey’s Cold Spring
Frog Eyes is a group from Victoria who now live in Vancouver. We recorded an EP [Notorious Lightning & Other Works] together ten years ago. I don’t know if we’re supposed to talk about their new album, but it exists, it’s mind-blowing and it’s gonna come out roughly around the same time as the Destroyer record and we’re gonna play shows together on the west coast of America.
Carey’s Cold Spring is a special record for me. I put a lot of old records on this list and I thought there ought to be something new on here, but my problem is that there’s not many new records that have people singing songs that I think have conviction or vision. But Frog Eyes have been very consistent for me. This record in particular struck me in a particular way. It’s a record that has a good lyrical dance, coupled with some really amazing guitar playing.
Frog Eyes doesn’t sound at all like Destroyer, but then you guys have worked together in the past, so you do fit together musically somehow.
I don’t know if we do. I feel like Carey Mercer is someone who really lays into his singing and his writing and takes it seriously and thinks about the musical world that his songs live in. I don’t think he realises it, but I think he disregards tradition. His songs exist somewhere in a world that’s very specific, but not necessarily one that we know. It exists, in a lot of ways, outside of pop music history, but it’s still someone singing, you know? It’s not necessarily experimental music and it’s not folk music. It’s definitely rock music but you really can’t tell right away what it’s drawing on, because its influences are outside of all the normal influences that we’re so used to hearing. It produces the illusion that listening to records, especially listening to someone sing on a record, is something you should take quite seriously and I like that illusion.
