Indie rock can sometimes seem like a figure skating competition, where those who can't make their vocals the prettiest instead aim for the highest degree of difficulty. Certain artists-- the Dirty Projectors, Joanna Newsom-- stretch the limits of the seven-note scale, crafting melodies that take longer to resolve than sentences in a German philosophy text. Others go for extremity of tone: the glass-shattering falsetto of Passion Pit, or the chest-rumbling baritone of the National. Frog Eyes' Carey Mercer grafts a combination of these approaches into his own voice, a slippery beast that sounds like it gargles with wax in the morning. And while some bands might settle for those vocal contortions as their only exotic feature, Frog Eyes' arrangements are every bit as unpredictable as Mercer's catalog of shouts, groans, and other odd emphases. At full flight, the band's lengthy epics trace impossibly complex patterns that can be briefly stunning in the rare cases where they improbably collide.
When we last heard from Frog Eyes-- before the weird-vocal derby really got fired up-- they left us with their best example of that spectacle: the serpentine, cathartic "Bushels". That song appears, at first, to have passed its baton to Paul's Tomb: A Triumph, which opens with the sprawling "A Flower in a Glove" and then winds its way through three more six-minute-plus journeys. But a disappointing pattern begins to take shape in each of these long chapters, as the band begins on a promising note during the first three minutes, but exhausts itself over the last nine.
That lack of endurance doesn't hurt the shorter songs on Paul's Tomb, which are powered by a claustrophobic energy of guitar screech, stop/start rhythms, and Mercer's strange, over-enunciated vocabulary. "Rebel Horns" packs several minutes' worth of multi-stage composition into an economical four-minute package. The similarly brief "Odetta's War" and "Lear's in Love" (in which Mercer tries to set the world record for most syllables in the stock lyric "I kissed a girl") both possess the kind of compressed, ferocious intensity that so often becomes diluted during the noodly excursions of the lengthier tunes.
All the same, it's clear that Frog Eyes like long songs. I like long songs, too. But the less focused, super-sized tracks on Paul's Tomb: A Triumph, especially compared to 2007's outstanding Tears of the Valedictorian, can't help but look like a hole shaped suspiciously like Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown's Spencer Krug, a former roommate and bandmate of Mercer's who doesn't appear here. Even in Krug's absence, cues could have been taken from him, or from Frog Eyes' other famous BFF, Destroyer's Dan Bejar, both of whom have recently charted long songs that stray far from their starting point, but nevertheless reach satisfying conclusions. As both of those artists understand well, even the flashiest skating requires a graceful finish.
