THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Open Up is cult rock band Frog Eyes’ second album since reforming in 2021, and their 10th record in a consistently bewildering and inspired catalogue that stretches back to the turn of the millennium. This record bursts with a joyful fealty to songs, to albums, to playing the song you want to hear with the people you want to play with in a space that lifts it all up.
The Open Up was tracked to tape by ace engineer John Raham (Frazey Ford, Destroyer), recorded off the floor, with subsequent vocal overdubs and electric guitar and grand piano flourishes. Huffy-puffy rock ’n’ roll, open-ended mid-tempo dreaminess, sad and soft love songs: It’s an emotional and spatial journey and meant to be experienced as an album. Electric guitar, piano-like synthesizer, frantic and frenetic drums and melodic bass fill up the corners and create a foundational support for the words.
As for those words: They are spit-sung into a special German tube microphone and shuttled out to a Studer tape machine to create the syllabic echoes. The sounds, as they converge in the centre of your speakers, make us think of 1995 emo at times. Their chord structures offer a remnant / echo of a youth playing in that specific genre, post-punk in their wired-up tautness and Fall-like square edges, offering weird blues, baby-bad-boy goth rock and more.
Underneath (as in an underground river) the entire Frog Eyes project — which started in 2001 and is coming up on its silver jubilee — is a flowing devotion to the idea of the album, the idea that a collection of songs could work together to create a body of meaning beyond each individual tune. Absent are any overarching themes or conceits. Present is a flood of pondering, of noticing, of trying to work it out. It’s the sound of two years of blinking. The personnel are Ryan Beattie, bass (and singing); Shyla Seller, keys; Melanie Campbell, drums; and Carey Mercer, guitar (and singing).”
