(Andy Synn puts the debut album from New York weirdniks Frogg under the microscope)
Metal, as we all know, is a serious business for serious people.
And what could be more serious than a colossal cosmic amphibian attempting to devour the moon?
Honestly, it kind of puts all our common, everyday concerns into perspective, doesn’t it?
Of course, a quick perusal of their lyrics (sample: “…their motive is clear yet they always cry wolf / to feast upon the sheep…“) will tell you that – like their peers in Vampire Squid (whose pun-tastic song titles conceal an underlying concern for the natural environment and our impact on it) or Slugdge (whose metaphysical mollusc-worship also serves as a potent metaphor for the struggle to maintain one’s mental health in an increasingly insane world) – there’s more to Frogg than meets the eye.
They’re not quite on the same level just yet, of course – with this being their first full-length album the band are ultimately mere Tech Death tadpoles in comparison, and clearly still growing into their adult form – but there’s definitely a lot of promise and potential to their OTT hybrid of indulgent instrumental proggery, shameless neoclassical shreddery, and retro-genetic Deathcore DNA.
Opener “Walpurgisnacht”, for example, is a prime example of the band’s genre-blending fusion-metal, landing somewhere between Colors-era Between the Buried and Me, We Are the Nightmare period Arsis, and The Faceless circa Akeldama as it shimmers, shudders, and shreds away at the established musical boundaries, while the more streamlined “Dandelion” suggests that, even for a band as demonstrably obsessed with excess as Frogg, sometimes less actually is more.
That being said (and, to be clear, I said “sometimes” for a reason) the mid-section of the album – running from the unstoppable metallic momentum of “Eclipse I: Bakunawa”, through the fluid, progtastic fretwork of “Eclipse II: Sickened By Silence”, to the catchy climactic grooves of “Interspecific Hybrid Species” (whose fret-melting melodic fury makes it arguably the best track on the entire record) – is where Frogg really show what they’re capable of… the heavier parts are heavier, and hit that little bit harder, the proggier parts are proggier, and push things that little bit further, and the hooks are, well, hookier, but also that little bit weirder in a wonderfully unpredictable, but equally irresistible, way.
Sure, there’s a few gaps in the band’s songwriting skills (a handful of tracks fall into the trap of just throwing as many riffs and notes at the wall as possible, in the hope that something will stick) and not every musical mutation is a viable one (the attempted inclusion of some almost Protest the Hero-like clean vocals in “Wake Up”, for example, while not necessarily a bad idea on paper, is an obvious evolutionary dead end in practice), but there’s ample evidence here, assuming the right combination of environmental pressures and forward-thinking, intelligent design – selecting for just the right genotypes and phenotypes to maximise the group’s hybrid vigour – that Frogg could easily develop into one of the dominant species on our planet in just a few generations.