The Frogs

Starjob (Mercury)
by Nik Rainey

A cursory listen to The Frogs‘ first major-label EP may leave you nonplussed. This is, after all, the group that began its recording career with an album graphically extolling the joys of gay sex to Bowieish folk-rock (It’s Only Right and Natural),and more recently returned with a collection of off-the-cuff home tapes just as infectiously offensive (My Daughter the Broad). The brothers Frog spent the intervening years recording a series of albums that were deemed unreleasable even by indie standards (the negrific Racially Yours being the most notorious). The Frogs are known to more people than have ever heard them, due to the patronage of pout-rock overlords Eddie Vedder and Billy Corgan (who recruited Dennis Flemion for the post-death leg of the last Smashing Pumpkins tour – with his grown-out Brian Eno ‘do and ubiquitous wingsuit, he was hard to miss), the notoriety of their previous records, and the scarcity of same. So now that they’ve hitched their stars to the corporate chariot, the curious will finally have a chance to hear what all the hoop-de-do’s about, and… well, it sounds like well-produced semi-indie rock, as good as but not appreciably different from the less-grandiose, more acoustified end of the alterna-spectrum. Pretty good but nothing special, nothing legend-worthy.

But listen closer. The first tune, “Lord Grunge,” is a bit hard to make out lyric-wise, but you catch references to “sweet greasy hair/ sweet grimy clothes” – again, probably nothing different from the irony-enriched self-mockeries that clog up CDs these days. But once the second song’s cheery pop melody kicks in and you start to sing along, you realize you’re singing “Everyone’s making a big deal out of the fact/ That I raped someone/ What’s the crime?/ I had fun…/After all, it was a nun/ And the priest wanted to watch.” (If they ever make a Broadway musical out of Bad Lieutenant ,expect “Raped” to be the showstopper.) Then you’re catching lines in other songs like “I think the handcuffs are a bit much” (“Weird”) and “Executive with his pants down/ Sitting behind a desk/ `How bad you wanna be a star, boy?'” (“Starboy”) and you feel your whole value system shifting beneath you. This is the kind of stuff that pop pranksters like Ween could never quite pull off – pretty melodies with a firm grasp of four decades’ worth of pop paradigm slicking up the chute for a deviant lyrical attack. Like their other records, it’s held together by a phlegm-thick string of conceptual unguent. This time, it’s a six-song commentary on pop stardom, with “I Only Play For Money” the manifesto (“I only play for money/ I don’t give a shit about the fans/ I only play for money/ I don’t give a fuck if you dance”), a perfect tab of subversion to slip into the cockrocktail of the unsuspecting consumer. This shoulda/coulda been a three-CD set in a solid-gold jewel box to complete the gag, but give `em time. The Frogs are just getting started.