Written by: Dave Cantrell
One of the best pieces of editorial advice I ever received came from Paul Morley. It was some review of something in 1979 or 1980, content and context completely lost and unimportant anyway compared to the lesson imparted in these seven simple words: “‘interesting’ is not a very interesting word.” He was correct, of course, as the word’s vagueness suffocates whatever descriptive meaning it might hope to convey. It was a shame for many writers then – those years were, after all, a very ripe time for ‘interesting’ records – and it’s a shame for me now, as the pair of musicians from Queens known as Frog (an interesting choice), guitarist/vocalist Dan Bateman and drummer Thomas White, on Kind of Blah, do indeed produce a singular style of intriguing rock-like music that’s as well-deserving of the poor bedraggled-by-overuse i-word as any you’ll hear this year.
Somehow managing to blur genre distinctions until, bizarrely, they come back into focus, Frog end up embracing the spectrum of ‘what’s possible’ in the ‘rock’ idiom with a deft, if enigmatic, sincerity. The quiet beguile that is opening track “All Dogs Go To Heaven” grows like a building spring rainstorm into something approximating a prog-pop John Fahey piece drenched in a mildly pissed-off folk punk mood, “Fucking”‘s brand of disorientingly delicate skew-pop sees Mercury Rev exploring Field Music’s dewy pastures and I’m sorry to be using easy referents like any hack music writer but here I have to think it serves us best as otherwise the lure of abstraction might be too great. “Photograph” has Pavement reviving Del Shannon with a sniff of gold dust smelling salts until the track is teetering perilously close to a ‘hit,’ and if you can imagine Ween channeling the Television Personalities with a country touch then you have “King Kong” playing in your head right now. “Knocking on the Door” finds the naif tendencies of Jonathan Richman teaming up with Brian Wilson’s wispy genius then teaching the Swell Maps a fresh new tune, the wistful “Catchyalater” catches Grandaddy out on a very sad prairie as they trace the very long shadows of Mark Linkous on a playground at dusk, “Irish Goodbye” beds itself in a lush rolling landscape of plucked acoustic instruments (banjo included) that suitably carries a vocal track waverimg from lilt to emotive yelp and back again and in the end rather defines poignant.
Mention the name of an album that you like and the first response is often ‘What’s the music sound like?’ The question, in any meaningful way, is generally unanswerable, of course, if only because everyone wants a quick, concise description and not the tetrahedral one that many albums rightly deserve, Kind of Blah not the least of them. But here’s my shot: It’s heartfelt indie, it’s americana recast as a kind of nostalgia for the future. There are hints of guitar soli and hippie urban jazz, an avant-pop trash aesthetic so sublimely reinterpreted as to become a leftfield modern classic (I’m thinking here of “Judy Garland,” a track that seems to sonically represent the soft heart of beautiful human vulnerability pulsing inside Hollywood’s Babylon). Kind of Blah is musically rich with its own peculiar drift to which it (very rarely) falls its own victim – “Everything 2002” floats in some lovely fog that it never seems to fight its way out of – but even then the rewards seep through the gauze to remind you that you’re hearing something the likes of which you’ve never heard before. One word I won’t use, should I be asked ‘that’ question, is ‘interesting.’ Kind of Blah IS that, but the complexities – subtle, flagrant, both – render that word, in service to this album, uninteresting indeed. Let’s just say the sui has seldom been this generis and leave it at that.
