Frog | GROG | Audio Antihero | November 2023
GROG, the fourth album from Dan Bateman’s New York-based alt-country project Frog, begins with a brief instructional audio clip from the Townsends YouTube channel on making the historical sailor’s beverage. At first brush, it feels like little more than a cheeky rib, a Ween-ism, something in there simply because Bateman thought it was cool that “frog” and “grog” rhyme before the record starts “proper.” In actuality, these 22 seconds telegraph the themes of GROG: how does the past inform the present, can the present inform the past, and what do we need to mix up to safely sail through the hellish seas of modern life?
“Goes w/o Saying” is an easing point, though it will likely still throw those unfamiliar with Bateman’s past work for a loop. It’s filmic: granular and deliberately paced, delicate and imperfect like a century-old stock would be. Yet this vintage quality – built around gently stumbling piano chimes, a percussive clack, and the tender whines of Bateman (who sounds like the missing link between Neil Young and Herbert from Family Guy) – is belied by a satiny synth drum. If it’s not quite anachronism, it at least represents a primarily analog tapestry that is not undercut but led in by the digital, just like that Townsends clip opens an album often informed by ancient mythological and religious texts. The synthetic is the backbone of the organic. Lyrically, Bateman invokes the grandiose rhetoric of Christianity, comparing himself to Jesus walking on water, to essentially say that he’s “really down bad for this one chick, bro.” He also throws a pager reference in there just to let us know that he’s out of step with time on multiple levels. It’s a hilarious song but also genuinely beautiful and earnest, and GROG routinely thrives within this cognitive dissonance.
But there’s not much routine about GROG otherwise. If “Goes w/o Saying” was a twinkling, melancholy waltz of unfulfilled horniness, its follow-up “420!!” is a crazed chase for weed and tacos, equally wrapped up in the bluegrass music of 50+ years ago and the freak-folk boom of the ‘00s – think “Dueling Banjos” meets Devendra Banhart or Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective: out of step once, and then once again. Even as the silliest song here, there’s an absurd and unsettling tone to how Bateman shoots into a yodel and how the banjo strings swarm around each other like a pack of flies. The actual stakes here are low, but the performance is one of frenetic desperation as if Bateman is the mountain man from Deliverance set to hunt you through the woods and turn your colon into a gravity bong. The AnCo tether holds somewhat on “U Shud Go 2 Me,” a comparably straightforward rocker sans the hippy-dippy outro chants of “Butthole Surfers / Was it worth it?” But was what worth it? Bateman paints the aftermath of a domestic incident with blood and teal lampshades, cops on trial, and the huffing of dirty clothes piles. It’s a pathetic tale by design: not necessarily empathetic but maybe pitiable. And this brings into focus another prominent theme of GROG: failure and its universality.
Frog doesn’t present as your typical NYC act on GROG. If anything, its often uncomfortably dark, hickish, surreal vignettes feel more in line with how Harmony Korine showed Xenia, Ohio in Gummo than any hip club-rock likely to strike it big in the boroughs. At one point, Bateman had hoped to incorporate samples from American Movie, a late-nineties documentary about Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt, before ultimately deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle of licensing. So, on its face, GROG would seem more directly aligned with Weerd America, the misfit Midwest, the folks with admirable hopes and dreams that spill out all wrong in a small town you’ll never know exists. But “New Ro” places GROG in New Rochelle, a lovely suburb of about 80,000 where “the girls, they put out in a car, and the waitresses all have a scar.” It’s perhaps the coziest track here if you ignore the corpses and ashes phrase that slithers in after the ketchup cupholders. But Bateman claims Hades, the Greek underworld, as the setting for GROG. It also checks out when you listen to lead single “Black on Black on Black,” a devilish disco-rock cut that spirals along a groove down to the pits of Hell, Bateman reframing The Odyssey along the descent. So which is it?
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, and that’s the point. What is the difference between the East Coast, the West Coast, the Midwest, and Hades? Not much. What differentiates a horny man who walks on water and a sorority girl born in a manger from the Messiah? Perhaps less than we’d think. Standout “Maybelline,” a subverted ‘50s pastiche about a woman fucked up on Dexadrine, dying in a crash, and then being discovered by a detective she was sleeping with, is the product of a dream where it was first a Bruce Springsteen song. And why can’t a Springsteen song that’s an incredibly messed up Frankie Valli song be a Frog song? If there’s a central thesis to GROG, it’s that all boundaries of time, space, and sound are arbitrary: everything and everyone is just a little ugly, and they’re wonderful for it. By that same measure, GROG is a little ugly but also quite wonderful.
Note: This review was originally published in Rantipole.
Travis Shosa is a writer from Spring, TX. They are the EIC and managing editor of Dodo Eraser. Their creative writing is featured in Stanchion, Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, The Bulb Region, HAWKEYE, Some Words and lots of other cool places. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Their journalism has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Line of Best Fit, PAPER, and others.
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