Frog Eyes - Pickpocket’s Locket
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Frog Eyes
Pickpocket’s Locket
Rating:
Pickpocket’s Locket might just be the best Frog Eyes album yet. Some might not consider it to be, especially coming after Paul’s Tomb: a Triumph and Carey’s Cold Spring, two fully developed, excellent records. However, I still feel I can say it without feeling dishonest.
But I want to speak about differences, because stylistic and thematic changes from album to album seem to go against the nature of a band like Frog Eyes. Ten years ago, one couldn’t have been blamed for predicting a consistent literary quasi-punk career for the band, a rougher, louder Destroyer or Wolf Parade. But beginning either with The Tears of The Valedictorian or Paul’s Tomb, Carey Mercer’s rock band (contrasted with his solo work as Blackout Beach or his group Swan Lake with fellow members of the Canadian Triumvirate Dan Bejar and Spencer Krug) accessed a mercurial quality seemingly unfit for a singular voice and peculiar temperament like Mercer’s. Tears introduced a more explicit pop skill, one that had been hiding in the welcomed roughness of his earlier works; Paul’s Tomb fulfilled and surpassed the promises made in Frog Eyes’s earlier discography and stands as a thoroughly uncorny record of religiosity and conceptual intratextuality; and Carey’s Cold Spring, more than diversifying Mercer’s approach as much as its predecessors, proved definitively that Frog Eyes is a band for the ages, about as far from an indie rock novelty as can be.
Pickpocket’s Locket, written on an inherited acoustic guitar following the death of Mercer’s father, is an album instrumentally unlike almost anything Mercer has done in Frog Eyes. It feels warm, with pedal steel, piano, saxophone, violins. Mercer sings with the same fire, his words are of the same kind as always — that is, ornate, replete with names, highly symbolic, biblical — but like the instruments behind his voice, he seems somehow warmer, less thorny, less ascetic. While this warmth (after a Cold Spring?) is obvious, fans of Mercer’s wordplay will miss nothing here: more than ever, he can wrap poetry into melody, fit too many syllables into a line as if they belong there, until they do.
“Two Girls (One for Heaven and the Other One for Rome)” opens the album as if on a mission to foreground the band’s new sound, with insistent (though restrained) drums, a saxophone winding in and out of verse and chorus, and plinking piano. Everything is immediately different. There are no sharp, distorted guitars here anymore. Everything feels different — everything, that is, except Mercer’s surrealist sermons and inimitable vocalizations. When they come in, they act as a comfort: a new pair of shoes, same feet.
The songs are shorter than usual for Frog Eyes, hovering around three or four minutes (excepting the unabashedly pretty closing track, “Rip Down The Fences That Fence The Garden”), but they sacrifice none of the usual depth. The avalanche vocal performance on “Crystal Blip” doesn’t leave Mercer tongue-tied, but it gives him opportunity to work the old muscles used constantly on The Folded Palm or Paul’s Tomb. He’s a wordy singer, but he’s good at it. And when the fiddle comes in, “out of place” is the last phrase one would use to describe it. Mercer is toning nothing down about his performances here. Throughout the album, the softer hues of the band serve not to pull Mercer down to their level, but quite the opposite: he is elevated and energized, his voice freed from the propulsive and distorted sound Frog Eyes had gotten used to. A cleanliness defines most of these songs, a clarity the band wears well.
Although warmer, almost folk-rock, Pickpocket’s Locket is as visceral an experience as any Mercer project, albeit in a new way. Frog Eyes is experimenting here, which feels odd to say about a band whose entire career has been an exercise in stretching the limits of a conservativizing indie rock. There is no rule against my saying this: Pickpocket’s Locket might just be the best Frog Eyes album yet.
01. Two Girls (One for Heaven and the Other One for Rome)
02. Joe with the Jam
03. The Beat Is Down (Four Wretched Singers Beyond Any World That You Have Known)
04. Death’s Ship
05. The Demon Runner
06. Rejoinders In a Storm
07. In a Hut
08. Crystal Blip
09. I Ain’t Around Much
10. Rip Down the Fences That Fence the Garden
Pitchfork 68
The past three years have brought a great deal of grief and uncertainty into Carey Mercer's life and music, but these days, the singer and songwriter's demeanor possesses a kind of aloof geniality. In concert, he seems just as content to talk and joke as play, like a charismatic acquaintance regaling you with stories at slightly uncomfortable length. In the muted and gently loping songs on his band Frog Eyes' latest LP, Pickpocket's Locket, too, Mercer playfully mulls over a couple of musical ideas rather than pushing past them quickly or distending them quickly into cracked-mirror reflections of themselves. The approach would have been quite different just a few years ago. The tremulous, haunted tenor of the early 2000s—or for that matter, the percussive, histrionic assaults of 2004's The Folded Palm, or the breathy, epic-poetic narration of Tears of the Valedictorian and Paul's Tomb: A Triumph—is a far cry from the more polite and conversational parlance of this album.
Pickpocket's Locket’s finds Frog Eyes sounding almost muzzled: The drums are hit with brushes and felt-tipped mallets, the guitars and bass are often acoustic, and a lot of the prime sonic real estate is taken up by bright piano chording and string arrangements from Mercer's erstwhile bandmate and former roommate —Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, and Moonface. Mercer’s vocal is dry and up front, speaking colloquially, and just from the padded studio room instead of from a mountaintop created by delay or cathedral-like reverb. Despite the record's deliberate transparency of production style, though, the musical structures are as hard to parse as they have ever been; the high dramatics and longform organization of earlier, heavier records feels more intuitive, while it can be pretty difficult to determine where verses and chorus begin and end here.
This element of the album points to why—despite his close association with consummate "songwriter" types Dan Bejar and Krug —Mercer's work calls for a different mode of listening, more like one would use with avant-garde music. Its surface-level structural complexity can add up to a net overarching simplicity, if one hears it first as an inchoate whole before worrying about picking it apart. Eventually, the important musical phrases distinguish themselves; in Mercer's case, in any song, a few distinguishing paeans create signposts. "Death Ship"s dense, "Thunder Road"-paced libretto is filled with sneered, ear-catching lines like "I floated to the New York on the back of a log" and "A man shot in the hand from indiscreet fire" which serve as organizational dividers. The ecstatic closer "Rip Down the Fences That Fence the Garden" is built around several belted and bright melodic phrases—"In the dawn, by the river I shall swaddle my wrath!" The goal in these lyrics is preserving attractive sibilance and meter at least as much as cosmic suggestion. Still, there are powerful shadows of meaning. Pecking at the edges of Mercer's neo-Modernist poetry are images of seediness and criminality— political corruption ("Crystal Blip"), lechery ("Two Girls"), and betrayal ("Rejoinders in a Storm"). But even the darkest moments feel perversely comic; the album lacks, certainly, the staring-into-the-abyss ruminations on mortality and human cruelty of previous releases.
In these clearer sections, Pickpocket's Locket proves itself to be increasingly rewarding upon repeated listens, but it still fails to deliver anything particularly remarkable. All of its component gestures can be found on other Mercer projects. The restrained sound palette resembles parts of FE's Carey's Cold Spring, the poppier moments recall Mercer's contributions to Swan Lake, and heavy piano work also anchors excellent Frog Eyes records Valedictorian and 2003’s The Golden River. The main distinguishing feature here is Krug’s string arrangements, but disappointingly, these can feel childishly simple and precious in the same, borderline irritating way as the heavy counterpoint in Krug's own solo work—see the layered, scalar instrumental melodies on Sunset Rubdown’s last two albums, in particular. At their best, Krug's charts here lend Mercer's more modest songs a baroque quality, reminiscent of the modest string work on records like John Cale's Paris 1919 or Robert Wyatt's Shleep (see, in particular, the effective, wry figures in "The Beat Is Down").
Mercer has long been someone worth keeping up with in indie rock; his voice has, since his early recording, been commanding, immutable, and seemingly impervious to trends. Fans have grown with the subtle changes in his mode of attack, and given the specificity of his style, sometimes it's easy to overlook the significant ways his approach has drifted since his formative releases. It's startling to realize Pickpocket’s Locket is the odd Carey Mercer release you can almost mellow out to. Once you delve deeper than the pleasant aesthetic, however, it's hard not to wish for a few more distinguishing moments to hold onto.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016