O, the four-track. Simultaneously the most naively underrated and clumsily misused tool in all music (besides maybe the euphonium), it inhabits a special place in every musician's heart. It's where many of us laid our first bedroom opuses to tape, songs unmolested by Audio Units Parametric EQ'ing or other digital affectations. It's also a device that many (wrongly) associate with bad songs: Just because lots of musicians start writing and recording using it doesn't mean an artist can't one day commit his best material to a hissing C90. It's simply that, after a while, most songwriters choose to upgrade to better equipment, for the obvious advantages, leaving the four-track in the realm of embarrassing memories from one's humble beginnings in the craft.
Ever mysterious and difficult to categorize, Frog Eyes have endeavored to deliver their songs back to the close-mic'd uteri on Ego Scriptor, a diminutive limited-press collection of 11 acoustic performances from the band's existing repertoire. Though many of the songs rendered on Ego Scriptor already had a distinctly lo-fi feel, they were buttressed by crystalline guitars and compressed drums-- nothing over-the-top for studio work, but polished nevertheless. On Ego Scriptor, those songs come unchained, losing their amplified baggage and morphing into vastly different creatures.
Here, the band's bizarre, cockeyed song structures and Carey Mercer's sallow, serpentine vocals are lent heightened amorphousness by the austere musical backing. Not only are these songs stripped down in production, they're also uniformly limited to one or two verses. Of the 11 tracks, the longest, "Sound Travels from the Snow to the Dark", clocks in just shy of three minutes, while the album itself blows by in a scant 24. However, such brevity brings a sense of immediacy to the music, exaggerating the band's already abundant idiosyncrasies.
The songs on Ego Scriptor range from intensely moving to intensely weird, poles Frog Eyes are no stranger to exploring. "A Latex Ice Age" opens the disc in the groggy amniotic fluid of a rainy Sunday morning, featuring Mercer's gruff, formless lyrics over a gently plucked acoustic guitar. "Bells in the Crooked Port" follows, impeding the sullen tone with more oblique, fairytale-esque verses and the album's most ineffaceable melody. Nowhere on Ego Scriptor is Mercer's voice more unsettling than here, especially when he moans, "I need matrimony like a captain need's his pony."
Perhaps most instantly recognizable of any number, though, is "One in Six Children Will Flee in Boats", a standout from last year's The Golden River. In acousticized guise, Mercer recreates his vocal delivery almost verbatim over a simplistic strum, but the result is no less affecting. On the flipside, "Sound Travels from the Snow to the Dark" is nothing like its original, and hardly resembles a traditional song at all, winding through non-repetitive verses over a seemingly improvised guitar line.
As with all Frog Eyes releases, Carey Mercer's bewildering voice steals the spotlight. I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone who so fully epitomizes the notion of the voice as an instrument. Mercer is a virtuoso of the human ability to make noise, and Ego Scriptor limns his talent in a harsh but honest light. My only complaint is that the songs are texturally limited, but that's to be expected from an acoustic album. The four-track is still an underrated tool, and Frog Eyes have used it keenly to produce a beautifully and often challengingly intimate album that fully capitalizes upon its possibilities.
