I met the nicest and most loving dog in the world when Frog Eyes stepped into my home in early May. Lead singer Carey Mercer and his wife Melanie Campbell have owned Suki since he was a pup and he’s traveled the world with the couple. He went on their honeymoon with them and was doing his first North American tour, supporting Frog Eyes and Sunset Rubdown for a few weeks. Suki doesn’t play a huge role in this piece, but he did lie nobly in the control room as mommy and daddy killed through three blistery new songs at Futureappletree Studio and he does make for an interesting contrast to Mercer, the dynamic pistol of a man behind the songs, each one another rattlesnake. Suki, demure and gentle, seems to have an inner calm that never takes to the brusque. He sits at peace with his droopy, rain puddly doggy eyes and never makes a peep. Campbell, one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, is quite the same way – quiet and soft-spoken. Then there’s owner No. 2, also one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, just with an acetylene torch for a motor that more frequently than not – when it comes out to meet the outside air – runs into a natural gas leak and sets everything ablaze. He makes that absolute, fucking best forest fires and explosions you’re ever going to witness. What a family. – Sean Moeller

First Song
Achaean Press (Frog Eyes) [1.49MB] [8734 downloads]


—“original version appears on the 2004 album “The Folded Palm”
Gone in a flash, Mercer thinks for a time that he’s a seal. As a little history lesson, the Achaeans were the collective Greek forces in Homer’s epic poem “The Illiad.”

Second Song
Caravan Breakers (Frog Eyes) [5.73MB] [11254 downloads]


—unreleased
Drown yourself in the carnivalesque keyboard line of Spencer Krug at the start of this song and then feel yourself sweat and spazz out with Mercer as the song chews at its own leg and then blissfully wishes for a valley made of gold. And who are these caravan breakers that prey on the weak, weak and the old?

Third Song
Bushels (Frog Eyes) [7.77MB] [9583 downloads]


—unreleased
This is that song that you get yourself utterly lost in the way you lose yourself in the eyes or legs of a beautiful woman, the way you lose yourself in a deep blue sky or a graph of a Nathanael West novel. It kind of feels like the traumas and comedies of “The Day of the Locust,” the riot at the end of the book and the gentle parts where Mercer sings, “When will I feel the sting of your sun,” are simple unexplainable and dreamy.

Purchase Frog Eyes music at: Insound