Frog Eyes has cultivated an instantly identifiable sound-- nearly every song in its repertoire contains singer/guitarist Carey Mercer's reverb-soaked guitar and raving vocals, drummer Melanie Campbell's typewriter rhythms, and spooky keyboards courtesy of either Spencer Krug or Grayson Miniely. But those elements have been pieced together in endless, often contradictory, permutations. To illustrate, 2004's The Folded Palm found Mercer crafting dense, compressed compositions that seemed to burn up as soon as they topped the one-minute mark. In contrast, the band's recent live sets have flaunted some incendiary new material, such as "Bushels" and "Caravan Breakers", that dynamically shifts between sections and stretches to epic lengths. In other words, it's Mercer's inventive approach to the formal structuring of his songs that keeps the band from falling into a well-worn groove.
With The Future Is Inter-Disciplinary or Not at All EP, Mercer and co. have found yet another way to toy with song structure, even undoing the very mechanics of songwriting as we know it. In a scant 17 minutes, eight fragmentary tracks segue into one another, creating a single piece of music. At times, the transitions are disruptive and abrupt; at others, the seams are so concealed that the division between two tracks seems arbitrary. As such, the eight tracks hardly function like songs. In terms of production quality, they're akin to the lo-fi and atmospheric home recordings on Ego Scriptor and the Emboldened Navigator 7". But unlike the material on those two releases, the songs on The Future are closer to segments that work toward climactic turns, only to fizzle out or be swallowed by the following track.
Most interesting-- and frustrating for many fans of Frog Eyes-- is that the tracks often forego an emphasis on melody to communicate their emotional tenor. Instead, they move forward in a linear fashion, introducing new sonic elements and gaining volume as they progress. As it is, it's a twisted approximation of how more conventional songwriting operates. "Really the End of Time?", for example, begins with Mercer whispering over plaintive strums. A sustained keyboard chord gradually rises in volume, while Campbell occasionally injects some erratic drumming and Mercer's whispers become a wordless, wailed refrain. The song builds in intensity, but then suddenly vanishes, leaving nothing to hold on to. "A Feeling: I Felt It" is similarly constructed, but pulls off the trick a little better. Starting with a skittering programmed beat and a bass line that sounds like it was recorded in an adjacent room, the song shapes up with Mercer's echoing and chiming guitars. Mercer repeats a vocal phrase as if chanting, but-- as throughout the EP-- his vocals are shrouded in effects to the point of unintelligibility. As it gains volume, it becomes increasingly hypnotic, conjuring Animal Collective's teetering sonic architectures.
While these experiments certainly show another side of Frog Eyes' project, they ultimately sound too haphazard and accidental to inspire repeated listens. On the one hand, the songs' peculiar structures could be a mirror for the EP's apparent preoccupation with the time and the future: linear progressions that build toward some perceived climax, only to collapse into yet another linear progression as soon as that climax is reached. But conceptual conceit aside, there's too little of what makes Frog Eyes such an arresting listen in the first place. Throughout, Mercer's vocals and lyrics are obscured, so that they surface in glimpses before waves of sound send them back to the bottom of the mix. So instead of Mercer's typical bursts of lyrics, you're left with snippets like "the little parking lot is paid for all day until dawn by the senator" from "Politics". Moreover, on its albums, the band uses less penetrable music to create tense foils for truly gorgeous eruptions. On The Future, the music lacks that sense of redemption. Only on opener "Future Fortress", in which Mercer sings over a fragile acoustic guitar line, do Frog Eyes approach such heights. But "Fortress", like every other track on this disappointing release, evaporates at the precise moment it seems to be getting somewhere.
