Frog
The Broadway, Brooklyn, NY
17 February 2020
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There’s many a valid criticism to be levied at music streaming, not least of which is that it doesn’t pay artists much of anything at all. But for its numerous and glaring flaws, the soulless algorithm has one talent: discovery. By the grace of machine learning, a song called ‘Don’t Tell Me Where You’re Going’ appeared in my Spotify queue one evening on a long drive home from Boston. Somewhere between exits for Dorchester and Quincy I became instantly enthralled by the pained narration of one Daniel Bateman, frontman and half of the Queens-based band Frog.
Frog’s songs are wordy, so at first blush all I really get is the chorus. Over patient drums and barroom piano, Bateman sings in a strained voice: “There’s something I want to say / I’ve missed you ‘specially of late / a shadow crosses her face / don’t tell me where you’re going – I’m better off not knowing”. The last part is like a bolt to the heart, the way he adds it so dejectedly to the end of the lines previous. I’m so shaken by the listen, so taken in by that one section I perceived clearly, that I play it again, and after that I queue up the whole album, limited data be damned.
It’s 2019, and nothing to come out that year hits me quite like that album, 2018’s Whatever We Probably Already Had It. All of 20 minutes and 8 tracks, there’s not a moment wasted, and I’d rank it as one of the best releases of not only that year but of the decade. In such a short time, the duo manage to traverse a vast array of themes and sounds, from the alt-country inflected and satirical ‘American’, to the supremely satisfying cohesion in the wall of guitar on ‘Journey to the Restroom’, and the gentle balladry of ‘Bones’, whose layered guitars recall the interlocking melodies of the Dessner brothers from Boxer-era The National. There’s tenderness and heartbreak, bombast and reservation, and a streak of black humor running through it all. Perhaps most exemplary of all is ‘God Once Loved a Woman’, which runs an emotional gamut that begins gentle as any Frog song has ever been, but ends with Bateman practically screaming, pushing his preternaturally elastic voice to its limits as the song reaches its emotional climax. More than on any of their other records, Whatever... showcases a side of Frog that is most comparable to the late David Berman’s Silver Jews or Purple Mountains, able to convey sadness through a talent for writing that few can manage, but with which nearly all can identify.
Bateman’s most prominent lyrical strength lies in how he uses the mundane to enhance the profound. His songs are littered with specific details that ground the listener in the immediate surroundings – makes and models of cars, songs on the radio, and TV shows will set the scene, the kind of eye for detail that can only belong to a New Yorker, in that city where every street and avenue is layered with so much visual information that one has to either learn to embrace every bit of that chaos or tune it out completely. Bateman is certainly in the former crowd. You don’t really need to know that the car Jesus Montero is watching in ‘All Dogs Go to Heaven’ is an Audi, and yet it brings more to the song than just a convenient rhyme. Scions and Camrys, Sade and The Prodigy, a dog barking in the background left in the mix – Bateman’s world-building is unparalleled, right down to vomit spilling forth from a traffic cone. But while New York is the backdrop for most of these tales, one can’t help but hear a little bit of the Lonesome Crowded West in the songs’ pervasive sadness, strange scenes, and vocal turns.
After drummer Tom White moved to London, 2019 found Bateman approaching Frog as a solo project, which yielded the aptly-named Count Bateman as a result. A little more lo-fi than before, just Danny, an acoustic guitar, and a drum machine for most of the tracks, these solitary sessions produced songs like ‘Black Friday’ and ‘It’s Something I Do’ that, for all their quietude, contain some of his best melodic writing yet over the warm fuzz of the mix. Then there’s ‘Taste’, a complete left-turn of a track full of seductive strumming over the low pulsations of the drum loop, as Bateman showcases a constantly-developing picture of a drugged-out state. Closer ‘Miracle’ is another high point, beginning with spookily-tuned guitars augmented only by the interjection of the occasional raw drum fill, Bateman singing softly and reaching delicately into a falsetto for the chorus. While White’s live drums allowed for some of Frog’s most exhilarating moments, including the frantic ‘King Kong’ from 2015’s Kind of Blah, working under new circumstances has produced an album that, for all its differences, is no less a showcase for Bateman’s unique writing.
All across Frog’s discography you’ll find a treasure trove of brilliant lines, but to extract and quote any of them here would be a disservice to you, the reader, and the band, for they all should be experienced in the context of their lyrical brethren. I wouldn’t dream of denying anyone the pleasure of hearing a song like ‘Judy Garland’ for the first time, listening as the lyrics fall from Bateman’s lips in a breakneck cadence over a soundscape that sounds like so much more than just two people.
Frog lives! Listen to Frog.
[Editor’s note: photos updated Jan. 2024 because I felt like it]
